Chapter Eight #2
“Sorry?” The old woman was calmly gathering up broken pieces of
what looked like dried clay from the mattress. She folded these
into her apron and briskly brushed away the dust. “You needed us;
you came. No sorry.”
“But I haven’t got any… I can’t pay you for any of this, not
now…” He tried to sit up, Sasha moving to help him, the old woman
pushing a pillow behind his back. He looked around him, taking in
the tiny, cramped room, the view beyond it to the kitchen Sasha had
said he shared with… “Oh, God. Am I in Cyril’s half of the
bed?”
Sasha
broke into startled laughter. “No. You’ll never believe this, but
Mrs. Cyril turned up on Friday night to take him home. She’d
tracked him down somehow. You never saw a happier man.”
“Really?” Laurie thought he was seeing a fairly happy one now.
Sasha’s voice was still unsteady, but some of the terror was
leaving his face. He supposed he had made a dramatic arrival.
“That’s good. Really good. I’m sorry I frightened you,
Sash…”
“It’s okay. You’ll be okay now.” Sasha slid an arm behind his
back. He gave an odd, short gasp, and Laurie saw that tears had
gathered in his eyes. “Fuck’s sake, though, Laurie. He did it,
didn’t he? I told you to get out.”
Laurie pressed their brows lightly together. Whatever his
reply might have been—well, he’s done his
worst now or never again—it was halted in
his throat by a sharp rap on the caravan’s outside wall. Sasha
restrained his bone-deep jerk of fright. But Mama Luna got calmly
to her feet and shuffled over to the door, as if she would meet a
whole army of men like Sir William without flinching. Laurie got a
glimpse of Gunari’s huge shape in the night outside, incongruously
holding up to the old woman a little bowl, in both hands, as if
whatever it contained was precious. She took it from him, nodding
and chuckling, and took the opportunity of being three steps above
him to pat him on his crew-cut head. Gunari said proudly, “Darozha,
Mama.”
“Yes. Darozha. Good boy. Go back to bed now.” Turning, she made
her way back into the bedroom, the bowl cupped between her two
palms. “Sasha,” she said, setting it carefully down by the bed.
“This balame seems to like you. See if he trusts you enough to take
that.”
Laurie frowned. He wanted to tell her he trusted Sash enough
to take anything from his hands. He remembered now, words heard in
the ice storm of his pain: “careful of
yourself around him, Sasha.” The old woman
had no reason to put faith in him, he knew, and he didn’t suppose
his kind had ever helped her in the past, but still it hurt him
that she could think him dangerous to Sasha, for whom he thought he
could die happily tomorrow if asked.
“Mama Luna,” he began but somehow forgot the thrust of the
thought between one instant and the next. The bowl was steaming
lightly, filling the room with a bitter scent. It should have
repelled him, but instead it seemed to soften his returning
memories in comforting veils. What had he been so concerned about?
Oh, yes. Trust. He yawned massively. Sasha’s arm was tight around
his shoulders now, his warmth so close that Laurie felt him
chuckle. “I told you,” he said to the old woman, whose name he
could not now quite recall. “I won’t hurt him. I love
him.”
“That’s good,” she said, brushing down her skirts and
rearranging her scarves to glowing magnificence. The little gold
galbi danced and shimmered on her brow. “See how much you love him
after he’s poured darozha down your throat. Sleep well.”
She was
gone. Laurie, who hadn’t seen her leave, rubbed a hand across his
eyes and raised a puzzled glance to Sasha. In the silence she had
left behind, he could hear his own heartbeat, and a brief spike of
adrenaline returned him to the surface. Involuntarily he saw again
the dining room in Mayfair, the first step—unknown to him at the
time—in his journey here. When he thought about the whole of that
journey, his mind balked from its totality. His last glance of the
hallway through a haze of blood.
God, it
had been just that, hadn’t it? A last look at his home.
He
couldn’t go back. For an instant, panic touched him. Breath heaved
in and out of his chest. Then Sasha’s hold on him became a bruising
hug. Why the hell should he care? Look what he’d won, in the midst
of his night’s losses. He was alone with Sash, curled up by his
side in a room which, though frail, he felt was inviolable. Nothing
could hurt them here. He felt his respiration settle enough that,
after a few seconds, he could ask, “What’s darozha,
then?”
“I don’t know.” Sasha brushed a tender kiss to his right
cheekbone, then withdrew with a hiss of sympathy. “She swears
there’s no frogs or newts in it, but… Ah, ves’tacha, he did make a
mess of you, didn’t he? Before you take your poison, let’s see to
that.”
Sasha
reached down, and Laurie saw with amusement that as well as her
steaming, mind-altering mysteries, the old woman had left a
perfectly ordinary tub of arnica on the bedside table. Sasha seemed
to read his smile. “She doesn’t reinvent the wheel, Mama Luna.
Here. Sit still.” Laurie did his best. He hadn’t looked in a mirror
since his one glimpse by the Daimler’s overhead light, but Sasha’s
gentle touch with the arnica seemed to be mapping out a landscape
unfamiliar to him, unexpected crests where pain flared like
lightning. “Why did he do it to you, Laurie?”
“Poor little Clara dropped the ball about our lessons. She
forgot you were a secret prince, and—”
Sasha
went still. “Tell me you didn’t get a beating like that because of
me.”
“No!” Laurie thought about it, memories returning in painful
slow motion. “Actually, no. That wasn’t it. I mean, he wasn’t
thrilled, but…he only really lost it when I told him I was…” The
word stuck a bit, but he’d come this far, and he brought it out
bravely at last. “When I told him I was gay.”
“Oh.” Sasha finished dabbing the arnica onto his bruises. “I’m
pleased he took it so well.”
“Ah, he’s just worried I won’t provide him an heir to his
plutocratic bloody empire. And I didn’t exactly put it like that,
I…” He fell silent, a cold grip closing in his chest. How could he
have forgotten? “Sasha…Clara!” Jolting forward, he tried to get out
of the bed. “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait,” Sasha commanded him softly, pushing him back. “Do you
think she’s safe enough—just for tonight, anyway?”
“I… I’m not sure. I think so, yes. But I’ve got to get her out
of there.”
“You will. Tomorrow you can take on the world, love, start
doing the things you need to do to get you and her clear of that
place forever. But you’re not going anywhere tonight.”
The
darozha, for all its bitter scent, tasted sweet. Laurie, who’d
cupped his hands around Sasha’s on the bowl to share with him
responsibility for administering the dose, made a face of surprise.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Ah. You must really need it. She gave it to me the first night
I came here, when I was sick from the cold and couldn’t sleep. I
tried a bit the next night, when I was feeling better, and it
tasted of rancid goat.”
Laurie
nodded. He was picking up a tang of that. It was the texture more
than the taste that was strange to him, as if he were drinking
barely dissolved leaves and bark. A faint sliminess. Nevertheless
he obediently downed the lot. Sasha took the empty bowl from him
and sat watching him as if he expected something to happen. Laurie
waited too. He was about to say sorry—for what, he wasn’t sure;
possibly his balame impercipience—when Sasha suddenly reached past
him and pulled a pillow flat on the mattress. Laurie thought there
was no need for it. He could sit up all night, talking to Sasha
like this. The pain in his side and his head, the pain in his
heart, was not just fading but gone. He felt ready for
anything.
A peace
like nothing he had ever experienced before swept down on him from
the van’s rust-flecked roof—a wild, rushing release of tension.
Laurie fought it—he had things to do, didn’t he, people to care
for?—but there was no chance. Tears of relief suddenly spilled down
his face, and he had no more control of that than the softening of
rigid muscle all down his spine and limbs. “Jesus,” he whispered,
and through rainbows saw Sasha reach for him, tenderly cupping the
back of his skull in one hand, clasping his shoulder with the
other, so that when he fell, it was gently, and his impact with the
mattress—and it felt like falling in slow-motion through a thousand
feet of sunny air—knocked him unresisting into sleep.
* *
*
Thin
curtains letting in a thin gray light. For a long while, Laurie
watched it, only breathing. He felt as if he had been unstitched
and rewoven. As if all the meshing threads that made up his being
had been gently untangled, laid out flat so that the grit, the dirt
and broken glass had fallen out from them, and then unhurriedly put
back together.
As if
his senses had been washed clean too. When he listened, he could
hear with crystalline purity the early-morning sounds of the
encampment. The burr of a generator coming to life. In the very far
distance, the silvery slither of Zaga’s chain. Oh, and he could
feel… A shudder ran through him, deep and wonderful: he could feel
Sasha, warm and naked, curled around his back. Sasha’s arm was
tucked under his head. The other was tightly holding his waist, and
Laurie remembered that in his strange dreams of that night, this
living safety belt had held him clear of monsters. “Sash,” he
whispered, the word a feather brush to skin in the pale
light.
“Laurie?”
He put
back a hand. He didn’t even want to look yet—just to feel the plane
of Sasha’s hip. The bone was less stark now, the skin like damp
silk. He moved his hand down and felt his palm brush Sasha’s
cock—quiescent but responding instantly to the touch. “Yes,” Laurie
murmured, smiling against the pillow, taking a blind hold on
him.
“You’re not even awake.”