Aleksey's Kingdom by John Wiltshire Page A

confusion that then immediately surrounded us, I had no time to think this through. The mother and father came running into the clearing. They saw the child pinned beneath a ferocious wolf and began variously screaming and shouting. This drew the soldiers, and Lieutenant McIntyre drew his sword and approached the child. Aleksey made a small gesture of his hand—I’m not even sure it was that much—and Faelan just suddenly wasn’t there. He slunk back into the dark forest, silent and watchful as he had been before.
    The child ran to his mother and buried himself deep in her skirts. Well he might. I would have killed him, I think, had not Aleksey been there with a restraining hand on my arm. He took over, made apologies, said it had been an accident, a misunderstanding. I could feel my fury growing. And then I glanced over at the woman. A pair of eyes was watching me from the folds of her skirt: bright, amused eyes. I swallowed and felt a chill run down my spine. I gathered Xavier and Boudica’s reins and walked them down to the track to the better light where I could see his face. He was fine. He was a warhorse and prized his scars as much as I enjoyed mine, no doubt.
    Aleksey soon joined me, and we mounted in silence and rode on to find the ford we needed.
    Uncharacteristically I was the first to speak. “Did you see it too? Did that actually happen?”
    He nodded, his face creased with worry.
    “What?”
    “Oh God.”
    “What? Aleksey, what?”
    He turned in his saddle a little. “Remember when I told you about them all, I termed him ‘odd’? I wish now I had told you what I had seen, but I thought it was a joke!”
    “Aleksey!”
    “In the colony, when they were closing up their house to make this journey that… thing, that… child… had a very young puppy. He was putting it into a tiny box, and I joked to him that it was too small for it to travel in, and he said it wasn’t coming, and I said then in that case he must give it to someone who would look after it, and he said he was going to hide it in the box because he wanted to know how long it would take to die without any food or water. I thought he was joking! I thought he was being like you when I ask if you have fed the horses and you say you have left their food outside the barn to see if they are clever enough to work out how to get it, or when I ask if you have seen Faelan and you say no, but you saw some wolf pelts with a trapper… you are always doing it to me!”
    “Aleksey… calm down.”
    “But—”
    “If he did do that, then the dog would very quickly bark, no? He would be heard?”
    He calmed a little but twisted around in the saddle to look behind us as if the little demon were there now, watching us. I confess the hair on my scalp pricked when I saw him do this. “Have you ever seen anything like that, Niko? You have seen more of the world than I, I know that.”
    I thought about this for a while. I had seen all sorts of evil and much horror. Watching your mother tortured to death is not common for children, I suppose. Was there something similar in the inquisitive way the Powponi had prolonged my mother’s suffering to so many days, to the way the child had looked at Xavier? I did not think so. I could not articulate this to Aleksey, as his world was more black and white than mine, but I had lived with those same men and women and become one of them. Was it not entirely reasonable for them, being told of this great God who was all-powerful—more powerful apparently than their gods who ruled the heavens and the earth just so—that they put his followers to the test? They would expect nothing less of their own but that boasted prowess was proved by pain and endurance. So I did not think what we had witnessed was the same as I had borne as a child at all.
    David was something other, but I did not know what. Finally I shook my head. “No, I have never seen anything like that.”
    “I think his family knows.”
    “Yes. I think