The Crimson Outlaw

by Alex Beecroft

  “Isn’t there medicine for it? Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  Father Petru drew out an unoccupied chair and sat, applying himself to his own breakfast, managing to make it seem as though he had inserted himself between Vali’s glare and Nicolae’s hangdog resentment entirely by accident. He waved a hand at the massive reinforced door that lead out into the central keep of the fortress. It now stood open, and the church was visible through it, surrounded by the modest flowers and heavy fragrance of a garden of herbs. “You could pray. Or you could keep your mind off it by helping with the rebuilding. The warriors pass through, Hungarians, Austrians, Turks, Wallachians, Moldavians, and they think they shape the world. But underneath there is always the harvest to think of, the crops to plant, the animals to feed. These things don’t stop for the sword.”

  So Vali spent the morning learning to guide a team of oxen to drag half-burnt support timbers out of the ashes of two houses. In the afternoon, he cut wood in the forest for replacements. The villagers were encouraging of his efforts and seemed to find his ineptness cheering, so he laboured on with a reasonably good will. But in the evening he found that Mihai had worsened—had stopped sweating, stopped talking, lay dry and motionless and hot as a rock which has just come out of the fire.

  “It’s quite expected,” said Nicolae. Most of the villagers had now gone home, and the great kitchen emphasized the loneliness of those who were left. Maria and her mother had gone too. Only the injured who could not walk remained, as well as a few folk whose houses had been burned, the priest, and the horse doctor. And Vali.

  “The fever may last two or three days. Then comes a crisis where either he will die, or the fever will break and he will recover. Fretting will not influence the outcome either way.”

  It was easy to see why he doctored animals and not people. Sulkily, Vali took a solitary pallet next to Mihai to sleep on, not having the excuse of either chill or overcrowding to allow him to share the man’s bed again. But just before Crina doused the candles, and after Father Petru had left the room, she took Vali into a corner and pressed a little bundle of twigs tied in red wool into Vali’s hand. “Put it under his pillow,” she whispered confidentially. “It’s a charm for health. I got it because my bones ache, but it may do him good.”

  It meant so much, coming from her, to whom he had brought nothing but disaster—hers had been the first house to be torched. He ducked his head and kissed her hand as though she were a countess. She giggled like a girl but smacked him on the arm for her husband’s benefit. “Don’t let Father Petru see you do it. We know the magic upsets him, poor holy man, and it wouldn’t be fair to make him have to take it away.”

  Vali gingerly pushed the thing under Mihai’s heavy head with some hope and spent a night of thought and anxiety, listening for the breaths that came always too shallow, too fast. He felt as though his own innards were being slowly compressed, his own breath throttled, and he told himself it was ridiculous to care so much over the fate of a man he barely knew, but his arguments were unconvincing when Mihai’s great presence weighed on the other side. Even limp and unresponsive, the power of him seemed to fill the room. The shape of his hands, the copper and autumn leaf colours of his closed eyelashes, his giant stature, the curve of his arms so unstoppable, his milk-white skin in contrast so fair. There was no other man like him, and Vali could not bear the idea of losing him before he ever truly had him.

  Even Nicolae was not so dismissive in the morning. He had a worried look as he packed up his few medicines in a bag to go home.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Nothing more I can do.”

  Vali seized the doctor’s arm, and again Father Petru stepped between them with a smile. “Vali. There is something in the church I need your help with. Thank you for all your help, Nicolae. Bless you for that.”

  Later, when he and Vali stood outside, with rosemary and borage and wormwood frothing to their knees, Father Petru confessed, “I share your concern.” Looking embarrassed, he passed Vali a piece of parchment with a list of directions and a small map drawn on it. “I think you should go up to see Rodica. They say she is a white witch, but I know her to be well versed in the properties of healing plants and somewhat more practiced in treating mankind than Nicolae is.”

  He gave a wry smile. “Don’t tell my parishioners I recommended this. They are simple folk and I don’t wish to confuse them. An attempt to explain that I approve of Rodica’s methods in some things is likely to be taken as approval of all, and they need no more excuse to waste their few belongings buying love charms and revenge charms against their neighbours than they already have.”

  The next day found Vali climbing into the foothills of the Carpathians, tugging a borrowed mare after him, with Mihai draped face down over her back. Mihai twitched occasionally, shuddered like a horse’s flank beneath a biting fly, but even when his eyes were open, Vali didn’t think he was seeing anything.

  The path, though narrow, was well trodden, and the rain had given way to a sweet spring day—glimpses of high blue sky above fluttering new leaves, birds’ wings whirring in the canopy overhead, and their voices cheeping alarms as Vali passed. A hollow in the path coincided with the howl of a distant wolf, drawn out and musical, but then the shadow passed and it was once more all water-glitter and violets under the trees.

  Vali did not like the thought of walking into a witch’s house. He kept his eyes open for signs of blight by the path. Turn up by the stone that looks like a beaver’s teeth, between the thorn tree and the holly, his directions told him, and you will be there. He expected to see it now at any moment—a ramshackle hut with an air of neglect, grass growing in the thatch of the roof. Perhaps a crow on the chimney and a thin cat in a garden full of hellebore and hemlock.

  Instead, the track came out into a small clearing carpeted in celandine. A snug house, much like Crina’s, was covered in stucco carvings of birds and painted a light wormwood green. In the front garden, hoeing a row of potatoes, a young blonde woman in a skirt and waistcoat that matched her house looked up when she heard the hooves. Dropping her hoe, she ran towards them.

  “I have been told he needs the witch,” Vali said, as she got her fingers under Mihai’s chin and raised it to sniff as he breathed. She narrowed her eyes at the yellowish-brown stain that had begun to seep through the shirt on his back.

  “Yes. Lift him down and bring him in.”

  This was easier said than done, Mihai bigger than both of them together could easily manage, but Vali was encouraged by the fact that when he was held upright he would gamely stagger in the direction in which they pointed him. They got him into the kitchen eventually, where the woman left him propped in a chair while she made up a bed on the floor.

  Some sort of assistant then? “Is she in?” he insisted, as the girl showed no signs of calling for anyone, but instead put a kettle of water on the stove and a hollow reed to soak in a bucket.

  “I am Rodica.” She gave him a withering look from eyes whose unflinching boldness was more suitable to a man. “And you are an idiot. Have you been giving him drink at all?”

  “He wouldn’t take it down!” Vali protested, guilty and stung because of it. “It would just fill his mouth and overflow. We did try.”

  “Useless. Very well, you take his shirt off and uncover his wounds. I will . . .” she demonstrated her intent by going out to the garden, and Vali, swallowing his pride, did as she said.

  The wounds, uncovered, were horrible. Swollen and seeping, pulling at their stitches like mouths that wanted to open. And Vali was more than happy to take orders from anyone if they knew how to cure something like that.

  Rodica returned with a basket full of fresh plants, brewed a tea—“This is catnip, feverfew, and mint. He needs the water and he needs to sweat.”—and got it down Mihai’s throat using a funnel and the reed. Then she washed the wounds with another tea that smelled strongly of pine and applied four or five leeches out of a jar around each. When the cre
atures swelled and fell off, she collected them up tenderly, put them back in their container, and stuck on new ones.

  After half an hour of this, Vali would have sworn the wound looked better. Ugly, slimy things, the leeches sucked out bad blood like nothing else. He felt far more hopeful by the time Rodica put them away and poulticed the wounds, “with comfrey, yarrow, and lady’s mantle to stop the bleeding and make the flesh want to pull closed.”

  More tea to drink, and this time Mihai showed signs of swallowing, so she removed the reed and pushed a full cup into Vali’s hand, showing him how to hold the other man’s head and coax his throat to swallow. He even got a smile out of her when he took to it with the enthusiasm of a little girl feeding her own lamb.

  “Ugh . . .” said Mihai at last, and tried to open his eyes. The burning forehead beneath Vali’s hand broke out in a prickle of sweat, and Vali laughed and cried and laughed again as the young witch grinned with pride.

  After that turning point, improvement came daily. Rodica kept them in the kitchen the first night, taught Vali to change the poultices and left him a time candle notched every three hours to show him when to do it. The fever broke that night, and in the morning she helped Mihai struggle over to one of her outbuildings, where dry wood was stacked under a hay loft with a sharply pitched roof. While Mihai dozed in a patch of sunshine, Vali built a bed for them there—a hollow in the hay thickly lined with sheepskin and covered in extravagantly woven red blankets with black, yellow, and white stripes.

  Barely able at first to crawl up the ladder and roll into the bed, Mihai stayed there, mostly motionless, for the first three days, while Vali tramped back and forth to the house, bringing more tea, and strengthening foods, and endless decoctions of pine bark to keep the evil spirits out of the wound while it healed. Although this was menial work he would have despised in his martial imagination, he found he was the happiest he had ever been in his life. He helped Rodica weed her garden, milk her goats. He swept the floor so that she could weave, and in the evening he would slip under the covers of a bandit’s bed, and they would kiss and gingerly toy with one another until Mihai tired.

  Quite often these nights would end with Vali rutting between Mihai’s closed thighs, or against the swell of his buttocks, and later to the still trembling stroke of his good hand, not quite strong enough on Vali’s prick. Mihai was still not sufficiently well to rouse himself. But whether Vali found release with Mihai or only lay quiet beside him, snugged up close, they would watch the barn owls fly out from the eaves, and they would talk.

  “Where will you go?” Mihai asked one night. “To be safe from your father. Hungary? Wallachia? Or further?”

  Vali had forgotten he was supposed to be seeking his fortune—he rather thought that he had found it already. “Will you come with me?”

  “Oh!” The note of surprise and fear was a reminder of how he had drawn back when they’d first met, bold enough for sex but made vulnerable by a kiss. “You would want . . .?”

  “Of course I would!” Vali’s fierceness lifted him up on his elbow to glare down at Mihai, an effect ruined by the fact that there was not enough light to see it.

  “You know nothing about me.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  Vali laid his cheek in the hollow of Mihai’s good shoulder and wound his limbs around him, and as the tale went on, he clung tighter and tighter until Mihai had to tell him to ease up.

  Mihai spoke of growing up as a viteji of the Grigorescu—a family whose lands Vali had always thought belonged to his father. Vali had thought this because his father’s first act as boyar had been to wipe out the Grigorescu clan and take their belongings for his own. Mihai had been offered the choice of serving Wadim, or death, and had chosen death.

  “He had imprisoned all Grigorescu’s retainers in a pit, meaning to parade us to our execution in the morning. But he had not realised that the Grigorescu family had been well respected by their peasants—taxes had been low and judgements fair. Predators, be they wolves or men, had been destroyed or driven off, and folk left free to thrive or helped if they needed it. So in the night we found a ladder dropped into the pit and all the doors open.”

  He laughed, a growl of a chuckle that made Vali’s state of sexual frustration leap back up into the forefront of his mind. Vali reached down and stroked, but Mihai was still soft, his body and his mind both in other places. “After which some of them went off to find other lords, and some stayed with me. The kernel of my little bandit kingdom.”

  This revelation woke Vali out of his sensual daze. “There are other bandits? A lot of them?”

  Mihai’s hand smoothed down his back as if petting a jumpy dog. “There are three others left who were once viteji, all of them closer to me than brothers. Doru, who was barely given his spurs before losing his lord. Tavian, who, I think, had a lover among the slain and grieves still.” He smiled, a blend of exasperation and humour suitable for a younger brother. “And Andrei, who took to the life of a hajduk with wild delight, like a hawk who has slipped her jesses and escaped to the trees. There are quite a few peasants less placid than the villagers you’ve met, who’ve joined us also. I should take you to meet them some day. They would be astonished.”

  “You should.”

  “They would also kill you.” Mihai drew Vali down to lie once more next to him, and there was a strange warmth to his voice when he said, “I almost did myself.”

  That fight in the woods seemed to have happened to an ancestor of Vali’s, a selfish child with whom he hoped he had no more in common than a name. The bandit too no longer bore a resemblance in his mind to Mihai, but was some dark bear-spirit with glowing eyes. He heard the confession without anxiety. “Why didn’t you?”

  “You struggled in my arms so deliciously.” Mihai laughed. “I thought how marvellous to make the old devil’s spawn my plaything. When he sent to pay for you, I would throw it in his face that I had had his little boy screaming for me, broken to my cock and loving it, before I sent you back.”

  Indignant, Vali turned his head just a little so he could bite Mihai hard in the meat of his good shoulder.

  “Oh now—”

  “So when are you going to do it? I’ve been waiting.”

  “You don’t mind?” Mihai shifted, lifting Vali easily and settling him on his back. He leaned over and rested enough of his weight on Vali to make him breathless. They had both taken to sleeping without shirts. It was a matter of merely bending down so that he could press his big mobile mouth over Vali’s nipple and suck it slowly between his lips.

  “Uh. I . . .” Vali arched up into the touch. He’d tried to be good, not to push Mihai before he was healed, but if he was going to get his reward now, he was very ready. “Apart from the going back bit, I’m all for it. I want to know what took you so long.”

  “Heh. Demanding,” Mihai observed, letting go, while Vali’s whole chest gave a disappointed throb and his prick joined in, insisting that it not be ignored. “But I think it will be a while yet before I can hold myself up on this arm. And that’s even if—”

  Vali’s hand cut him off. Vali had wormed both of them around so that he could cradle Mihai’s balls in one hand, massaging them gently, while he stroked the shaft of Mihai’s prick with the other. “Oh,” Mihai said. “Well, look at that, it seems you can even wake the dead.”

  Because the skin was firming under Vali’s touch, Mihai’s prick coming to life in his hand, growing and hardening and standing tall. And it was magnificent. Vali shoved Mihai onto his back, shucked his trousers off and straddled Mihai’s knees, so that he could bend down and lick the tip with his tongue, exploring the arrowhead shape of it and the healthy, hearthfire warmth.

  “Would you like me to tell him?” Mihai panted, his good hand curling into the straw of their mattress and tugging, and Vali found he rather would. He suckled on the head of Mihai’s prick and imagined the shock on the faces of his father’s courtiers if they were told the tale of his debauchings in exquisite
detail. He imagined all the little things they’d do to hide the fact that what they really wanted was to touch themselves, to stroke along.

  “How I opened you up and fucked you hard?” Mihai bucked up unexpectedly, the width of his prick stretching Vali’s jaw, the tip of it choking him. Tears came to his eyes and his throat burned, and he had to lift off and pant, curled over his own cock, concentrating hard not to spill right there. He wanted Mihai’s strength. Needed it. He put his head back and scored his fingernails down his own chest from collar to hip bones, lust flashing red-raw as he scratched across his nipples.

  “Then get up here.” Mihai’s hand closed around his throat, the edge of it driving up beneath his jaw, the palm pressing firmly on Vali’s Adam’s apple. He pulled with almost his old strength, yanking Vali off balance, forcing him to scramble up Mihai’s body until he was splayed across his lap.

  Over the last two days, the poultices had given way to salve, wound herbs green in a base of ox fat. Vali had noticed its slide on his fingers and wondered what it would feel like if he used it as he was about to now. It melted with a pleasant scent on Mihai’s prick, made it glossy and slippery and no less hot. Eagerly he trapped Mihai’s hips between his knees, got hold of that big prick and tried to lower himself on it.

  The touch of the head to his arsehole sent such a shock of mingled bliss and terror through him he had cried out and jerked away before he knew what he was about, and Mihai eased his chokehold enough to turn it into reassurance. Vali thought with a stab of miserable anger that if Mihai said anything at all about virgins, that would be the end for them. He wasn’t prepared to put up with coddling, or worse, ridicule. Stupid thing! He wanted it so much, why was it not working?