Scrabbling back, he brought up his knife and then switched direction, coming at them fast and low. He slashed one across the tendon, but the thick moccasin boots protected him, and he just howled and limped for a moment until spinning around to bring the axe down on Ben. Ben dodged it and went for the other man. The axe caught him a glancing blow to his shoulder. He felt it slice open his flesh through his thin jacket. He sprang to his feet and kicked the axe out of the man’s hands, taking it himself. They faced off then, Ben with a knife in one hand, axe in the other. His strength was fading fast and they could see it.
§ § §
Nikolas set the pace, mindful of those less fit than himself but also mindful of Emilia and what she was enduring. They reached the cabin and flung themselves to the lip of the bowl. There was no sign of life. All they could hear was the thunder from the torrents as, swelled from the rain, they crashed over the glacial boulders. Emilia wasn’t there. Nikolas cursed. He turned to go back to the forest, but Lucas suddenly stood and crowed, “Look, knives on that bench. We can take them.” He began to run down into the hollow. Nikolas shouted for him to stop. He turned his head around for a moment, puzzled, but his momentum was carrying him down. Suddenly, he fell and screamed. It was a terrible sound. Jackson began to scrabble down the bank, and with Nikolas behind him they reached the ground. Lucas was screaming and writhing, holding his leg, which was clamped in an ancient, but vicious bear trap. The teeth of the trap, designed for a three-hundred-pound bear, had gone through the bone of his leg, almost severing it, but not enough to free it. Jackson wobbled, turned away and vomited what little he had in his stomach. Nikolas shouted at him to take the other side of the teeth and together, using their considerable strength, they got the jaws open.
Lucas was too incoherent to understand what they were doing. He was arched in agony, screaming. Jackson cried out, “I can’t hold…” and let his side of the teeth spring shut again, which wrenched Nikolas’s side from him. The trap sprang back shut, less force than before but enough to send the screaming to an even higher pitch. Nikolas looked at the shattered shinbone. Lucas was only held now by a few shards of bone and flaps of skin. He took out his knife, ignoring Jackson’s shouted protests and hacked Lucas free. Fortunately, the man passed out, so as they applied a tourniquet to his thigh, they were able to do so in silence. They both knew Lucas wouldn’t survive this. The bottom half of his shattered leg was still in the trap. Blood soaked them all, the tourniquet doing little to stop the bleeding. The stump remaining was jagged with broken bone.
Nikolas stared at Jackson. He knew what had to be done, but he wouldn’t do it unless they both agreed. Jackson clearly didn’t agree. Nikolas saw that the lawyer understood Lucas’s terrible predicament but that Jackson could no more countenance his killing than he’d been able to contemplate killing the girl. He didn’t have the edge of savagery necessary to be a survivor in this place. Nikolas nodded to the unspoken refusal, swung the unconscious man up onto his shoulder and announced they had to leave. They still had to find Emilia; although, by now, Nikolas knew it was too late for the girl. They might be able to find her, but she wouldn’t be Emilia; she’d be the shell of that girl, something left after the savagery of these men had destroyed the essence of what she’d once been.
They climbed back up to the forest and made their way toward the river once more. Ulyana Ivanovna would take Lucas and do for him what she could.
§ § §
Sean Sands couldn’t believe his luck. It wasn’t the blond fucker but pretty boy. He came out of nowhere. Took down one of the men who’d been tormenting the girl. Who’ve thought it? He’d always liked pretty boy, fag or not.
Now the odds were much more even.
He took the opportunity Ben gave him and slid quietly away into the woods. He grinned a little through the blood, imagining the blond cunt’s face when he saw pretty boy, all broken and bloody and dead. Saw that pretty face punched. Bet there wouldn’t be so much kissing and fucking touching then. He limped along. He couldn’t get his head straight. It was mussy and confused. He thought he’d been heading back toward the river, but the ground was rising. He turned and went another way. The forest was incredibly quiet.
§ § §
Nikolas staggered. He stopped and shifted Lucas. The man moaned. Nikolas could feel the blood on his clothes, tried not to look at the bone stump. Lowering the terribly injured man to the ground, he straightened and held Jackson’s gaze. The lawyer shook his head vehemently. He still wasn’t prepared to take responsibility for what had to be done. Nikolas knew he’d have to shoulder it alone. He took out his knife and bent, but something flew out of the trees, pale, streaming blood—no, bright copper hair. Emilia flung herself around Nikolas, as if his body represented all safety and all kindness, and then she lifted her filthy, tear-streaked face, burst into tears and sobbed, “They’re killing Ben.” For her first words to Nikolas, ever, they were impressive ones. He turned toward the direction she’d come and began to run.
§ § §
Ben dragged himself to his feet for the last time. He knew he wouldn’t be able to rise again. The men confronting him appeared similarly exhausted. One was on his knees, holding his belly, retching and spitting. Ben circled warily. He went for the downed man. The other believed the deception and began to move to a better position, and Ben reversed his swing suddenly, catching the standing man in the face with the axe. It sank into his mouth, detaching his jaw. Ben let the handle go. That one was no more threat. As he half-listened to the falling body, he felt the kneeling man grab his leg. It was his injured leg, and he shouted in pain and pulled away. The man hung on, sinking his teeth into the swollen wound. Ben screamed and hit at the greasy hair. It was only when the teeth let go, he realised he’d been hitting with the knife in his hand. The man’s head was a bloody pulp.
They were dead. He couldn’t hear for the ragged panting of his own breathing, for the pounding in his ears where his blood dizzied him. He staggered back and hit into something very solid. Agonisingly slowly, he turned. He lifted his eyes, inch by inch. The man standing behind him dwarfed him. Ben had never had to lift his eyes to meet anyone’s before. It humbled him. The man’s bulk was enormous. All he could see of the face was a pair of eyes, bloodshot, until the man opened his mouth and displayed blackened teeth. He leered and said two of the few words of Russian Ben knew, “Pretty. Very pretty.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nikolas followed the trail the terrified girl had left behind her. He came into a clearing. Three bodies. No Ben. He took some weapons, an axe, another knife, and picked up a trail. Something being dragged. Blood. Signs of a scuffle. More dragging. More blood. They were heading toward the cabin. He began to run again, exhaustion pushed to one side. He stopped once more at the edge of the encampment. There was the leg, still obscenely stuck in the trap, the blood…It was like being in a nightmare from which he couldn’t escape, condemned endlessly to run in these woods, making mistakes, losing people. Losing Ben. And always the sound of the river. Nikolas knew if he lost Ben here to this horror it would haunt him for the rest of his life. He began to edge his way cautiously down into the flat, fetid floor of the valley, mindful of traps, very aware of poor Jonas Terry and his terrible warning. Suddenly, the door of the cabin swung open and the vast giant of the man Nikolas had seen before came out. He was naked. He was scratching his belly, his vast, pendulous cock swinging, partially erect. He took hold of it and pissed in an arc into the mud.
Nikolas saw a bright whiteness in his eyes as if he’d turned a corner driving in snow and been completely blinded. Everything he knew, all his training and caution and skill flew away from him, and he was left just a man thinking another man had touched what he loved. He took the giant down. They hit the mud with a sickening crunch. But for the first time in his life, Nikolas’s huge body and power was nothing compared to this bear that dwarfed him. The man grabbed him by the ears, slamming his forehead toward Nikolas’s face. Nikolas had had his nose bro
ken once though and wasn’t about to let that happen again. He brought his arms up, breaking the man’s hold and kicked him.
Nikolas had his boots on. The man was naked. Nikolas aimed for the most obvious place. The giant grunted and curled around his balls. Nikolas staggered back and went for the cabin door, but the huge man had risen and slammed Nikolas against it. He was face to face with Jonas Terry once more. Nikolas wondered if the horror of his life could get any worse. It did. The bear put his hands around Nikolas’s neck and began to squeeze.
Once more, Nikolas had to experience what other men had endured from him. Raw, unarmed physical power defeated him for the first time. He couldn’t break the man’s hold. He staggered back a little. The man went with him, still squeezing. Blood pounded in Nikolas ears as his life drained away. His desperate pulse drowned out even the sound of the thunderous river. But then Nikolas knew what he had to do. With his last strength, he just kept pushing back into the giant, feeling him give way. In a macabre dance, they moved toward the river. The giant began to laugh and shake his victim, lifting Nikolas by the neck as he was squeezing, muttering imprecations about the blond officer he had at last in his hands. The one he’d stalked and watched for days with his elitist voice and beauty, his grace and his power. Nikolas felt the man’s hatred, read his exultation through the hands squeezing the life out of him, knew that loathing this intense would have festered in this terrible place for over twenty years. The giant man screamed out his great fury and then his joy, shook the nearly dead Nikolas one more time—and then just stepped back off the edge of the world. They fell together into the swirling torrents.
Instantly, the hold on Nikolas’s neck broke. He took a huge lungful of air, but it was water instead, and he choked, water and bile shooting out, but then he was up out of the water and breathing. The giant was ahead of him. He banged into a boulder, and Nikolas was able to bring his arms up to protect his head, as he bounced off it as well. The water channel narrowed. They bobbed through it, the naked man, obscene and white like some horrific river monster. He was trying to make his way to the shore but the current was too strong. Nikolas was struggling to breathe, his throat swelling up from the strangulation. He was weighed down with clothes and exhaustion.
Suddenly, the giant had hold of a branch, it held for a moment then snapped, but the delay enabled Nikolas to catch up, and he grabbed onto the slippery, foul flesh and tried to rise over him, to sink him down, but all he got for his trouble was an elbow to the side of his jaw. The sound of the water increased, and suddenly they were falling. A small waterfall crashed down from the swollen river into a deep, wide pool. Nikolas was under the water, turning and tumbling, and he saw the giant, white and obese below him. He swam down and grabbed him. At the same time he saw the crack in the boulder. He slammed his boot into it and twisted it sideward, trapping it.
The giant realised what was happening, what Nikolas intended to do. He struggled in Nikolas’s arms, beat at him, tried to bite him, but he was weakened from the fight and his tumble through the river and hadn’t expected this.
He wasn’t a swimmer. Nikolas was. Nikolas could hold his breath for a very, very long time. So he did. He watched the struggles become more and more frantic and then they became feeble. Bubbles escaped between the giant’s lips. His multi-coloured braids of hair rose, floating away from him. It was plaited hair: blond, raven, and red…His eyes went wide with the realisation he’d been defeated—that he’d met a more powerful life force than his. At last, he hung limp in Nikolas’s arms, eyes straining, staring blindly up at the light he wouldn’t see again. Nikolas pulled his foot free of the crack and just let his body float away. He had no strength to do more. The water carried him on, spat him up, pushed him under, flung him against some rocks and then carried him to the gritty shore.
§ § §
Ben lifted himself from the stinking fur bed. He could hear the sounds of a fight. Something slammed into the door, making it rattle. He tipped off onto the floor and crawled toward the sound, saw his clothes and stopped to drag them on. Dizzy and sick, he fastened his boots and stood shakily to his feet. The blood rushed from his head, and he swayed for a moment. He staggered toward the door, pushed it open. It was so dark inside the squalid cabin the bright daylight blinded him momentarily. Squinting, he looked toward the sound of the river and saw Nikolas and the giant, naked man tipping back into the river. Nikolas was being held off the ground by his neck as he fell. He appeared more dead than alive. Desperately, Ben limped across the muddy ground to the riverbank and then began to jog and limp, jog and limp, following the course of the river.
He came across Nikolas about two miles further downstream. There was no sign of the giant man. Ben fell to the ground alongside the body and turned it over. There was a faint pulse. He ripped Nikolas’s shirt open. His chest wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. Ben slid his hands under Nikolas’s shoulders and lifted them, tipping his head back, opening up his airways, pinching his nose. He breathed air into Nikolas’s lungs for him, despairing when he saw the swollen state of the strong neck. He kept breathing, checking the chest, breathing, checking the chest. He wasn’t going to be able to keep going. It was incredibly tiring doing this. His head was swimming once more, but then there was jerk, a shot of water came out of Nikolas’s mouth. Ben turned him to his side and held him as he vomited water, retched, and coughed his way back to consciousness. Finally, he was breathing and awake. Ben put his face down to Nikolas’s wet hair and just soaked him in for a moment. It was over, and they were both alive. Nothing else mattered.
Nikolas sat up, holding onto Ben for support. He glanced back at the pool of water for a moment then at Ben. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He tried again, frowned and still couldn’t make a sound. He put his hand up to his throat and probed it gently. Ben, laughing through his tears, told him, “You look like you’ve got that collar I’ve been thinking of buying for you.”
Nikolas croaked out, “What did…?”
Ben shook his head. “I’m fine, Nik. Leg’s bad, but nothing you can’t fix, yeah?” He meant that. There was nothing wrong with him Nikolas couldn’t fix. “Emilia?”
Nikolas gave him a nod to indicate she was safe. It was clear he regretted saying what he had already. Holding his throat, as if this would help, he rose unsteadily to his feet. He swayed alarmingly. Ben took his arm to steady him, and Nikolas saw the wound on Ben’s shoulder. He gave it a quick inspection, and then they began to limp together back to the island.
§ § §
Lucas was dead. Nikolas wasn’t surprised. Emilia was sitting huddled with her grandmother, so close together they resembled one person not two. Ulyana Ivanovna cried out and rose to her feet, coming toward them, but she was beaten by a slim, red-haired figure who flung herself first on Ben and then on Nikolas. Nikolas had more female kisses in the next minute than he’d had in his entire life. Emilia laughed at his neck, but kissed it and whispered shyly her thanks into his chest. Then she turned her great joy on Ben again and pulled him toward the fire, and just like a miniature version of her grandmother, began to fuss over his leg and shoulder. Ulyana Ivanovna came up to Nikolas and took his hand. “Is it over?”
He looked up at the sky for a moment, his lips pursed, then mouthed with a faint sound of voice, “We’re in Siberia and winter is coming.”
She put her arms around him and hugged him, and they stood that way for a very long time.
§ § §
Nikolas led them all to the cabin. He went first, leaving them at the lip of the small valley. The trap still held its grizzly contents, but he couldn’t open the teeth on his own. He dragged the whole thing under one of the skinning tables and dropped a half-finished fur on top of it. Then he went to the door. He wasn’t as heartless as he liked others to believe. This tested him. He tried to avert his eyes, pulled the awful remains of Jonas Terry off the door and carried it to the river. He laid him in and watched him tumble away. He shuddered and wished, not for
the first time, he’d just flushed Gregory down the toilet at home. The old bastard would probably have found that funny. Finally, he went cautiously into the cabin, not sure what he was afraid of, but terrified nonetheless. It wasn’t like him to fear anything, but almost silenced by his terrible throat injury, he couldn’t relieve his fear as he usually did by annoying Ben.
He searched around, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, when he saw the thing that made his fears justified. There was a small scrap of material lying on the ground. He knew what it was. He recognised it. It was Ben’s boxers. He looked at them for a long while, thinking, assessing, weighing up what this meant to him and to Ben. The giant had been naked and clearly Ben had been too. Where was he to go with this knowledge now? What would it mean for them if he pursued this? He wrapped his arms around himself for a moment; it seemed to help. Ben knew a lot about his past now. It didn’t take much to put together the things he’d admitted, for Ben to have a picture of how it’d been for a beautiful seventeen-year-old in a prison camp, relying on the twisted interest of strangers to survive. He knew Ben knew he’d been raped many times. But Ben still loved him. Ben had loved him from almost their first meeting, and that love had broken Nikolas open, laid him bare and reinvented him into the man he was now. Nothing Nikolas had ever told Ben about his past had changed the way Ben felt about him. Should this be any different? Was Ben any different because of this?
The Bridge of Silver Wings Page 12