Victory Feast

It was the third week of the war. Smoke had not yet stopped curling from the distant chapel on the hill. Men bled into the mud by the hundreds. And on the field, in a choke of rain and ash, the king had fallen.

The king wore white plate streaked in black and red. His horse gone. His sword split. An enemy axe in the meat of his thigh. When the king screamed, it was not noble or defiant, but animal, throaty, wet.

He crawled. Toward a stump. Toward nowhere. And then the soldier came.

No title. No banners. No horse. Just a dented helmet and breath that steamed even in summer. He did not speak. He killed two of the enemy with a pickaxe that bent on the third skull. When it snapped, he took the sword from the one he’d just felled. Finished the fourth.

When the king looked up, he saw not God, but a peasant with a farmer’s face. Long scars. A nose broken more than once. The kind of man who never got mentioned in stories because he was the one buried beneath them.

“You’ll die if you stay,” the soldier said.

“You think I don’t know that?”

The soldier didn’t respond. He bent low, lifted the king up like a sack of oats. Over one shoulder. He walked. Past the fires. Past the dying. The king, ashamed, silent, didn’t speak again until they were at the edge of the camp and someone recognized him.

Later, after the healers, after the morphia and the cutting away of infection, the king summoned the soldier.

“You saved me,” he said. The soldier didn’t answer.

The king sipped wine. “But you cannot say that you did. Not to anyone.”

The soldier frowned.

“Why?”

The king looked past him. “Because the throne is not held by gratitude. It is held by myth. And the myth says I do not fall. I do not scream. I do not bleed in the dirt and cry for my mother.”

The soldier nodded, slowly.

“You’ll be paid,” the king added. “Handsomely.”

The soldier only said, “I didn’t do it for that.”

“I know,” said the king.

The feast came a week later.

There was meat. So much of it the dogs outside the keep grew fat. Women with bright paint on their lips and metal around their ankles danced until their heels bled. Wine poured like the rivers they’d poisoned. And the king sat high at his table, healed enough to walk, drinking deeply from a silver goblet.

The soldier was there. In the shadows. Half-dressed in the uniform of the royal guard, which still didn’t fit right. The breastplate hung too heavy on him. But the wine made him forget.

He drank. Then drank more.

He laughed at the nobles’ limp hands and soft stories. He found himself surrounded by the lesser sons of barons, boys who had never seen mud like he had. He told them what happened. In pieces at first. Then all of it.

He told them how the king had soiled himself. How he’d begged.

“Swore to God,” the soldier said, “that if I got him out, I’d be made knight. Said it like a prayer.”

They laughed. Not all of them. One went quiet and slipped away. The king was told before the feast ended.

The next morning, two guards brought the soldier to the throne room.

There were no charges read. No explanation.

“You were given a gift,” said the king, without looking at him.

The soldier opened his mouth. He couldn’t speak.

“You chose humiliation. You chose lies. You chose to take something that wasn’t yours to hold.”

“I told the truth,” the soldier said.

“You told a story that doesn’t serve the crown.”

The king motioned.

The soldier was dragged to the courtyard. A boat awaited. Split in two. Hollowed. Lined with wool.

“No,” he said. “No, please. Not this. Not like this.”

The king did not look back.

They stripped him bare. Strapped him into the lower half of the boat. Arms pinned. Legs spread. They slathered him in honey. It sank into his skin, ran into his eyes, filled the cracks of his mouth. Then they brought the milk. Warm goat’s milk, ladled down his throat until he gagged. He vomited. They forced more.

He begged. One of the guards wept.

They placed the second boat atop him, sealing him inside. Only his head, arms, and feet exposed. Then they floated the vessel out into the marsh, near the edge of the forest, and staked it in place.

And left.

The first day was sun and sweat. The soldier screamed. Then whimpered. Then sang nonsense songs to keep the wasps from crawling into his mouth. By night, the rats came. He felt them crawling over him, sniffing at his toes. He could not move.

The second day brought rot. The milk inside him fermented. His bowels let go. The honey on his face drew more flies. They laid eggs in the corners of his mouth. His screams now came only in broken bursts. No one heard them.

By the third day, the insects had laid claim to him. Maggots tunneled into his gut. Beetles stripped the skin between his fingers. His eyes swelled nearly shut. His throat too dry for speech.

Still, he lingered.

The fifth day, his flesh began to slough. The rot came in waves. The stench curled into the reeds. Something inside him moved wrong. Burst. Leaked. He wept for death, but it would not come.

By the seventh day, he was more wound than man.

They stopped watching after that. Even the guards sent to check on him turned back from the smell.

Then it was the tenth night.

The king sat alone. The throne room empty but for the cold light of braziers and the long echo of power. He drank. His leg ached. The wound not fully healed. He flexed it and winced.

And the door opened.

The guards should have stopped whoever entered. But they did not. Because they were not there. Because they were asleep. Or dead.

The soldier stood in the doorway.

He was whole. Or close enough. His clothes clean. His skin pale, tight. The scars gone. But the eyes. They held the look of a thing that had seen itself die.

The king stood.

“Is it you?”

The soldier said nothing.

“Did they free you?”

Still no answer.

The king took a step back. “Is this a dream?”

He did not feel drunk.

The soldier moved closer. Slow. Silent.

“You should be dead.”

He did not say it like a man grasping for truth, but like one already sure of it.

The soldier’s mouth moved. Not a word. Just a whisper.

The king dropped the goblet.

He fell back into the throne.

The soldier was inches away now.

“I did save you,” he said. “But that was a mistake.”

The king tried to speak. Couldn’t.

The soldier leaned close. “Now you’re going to learn what it means to rot.”

He stepped back.

The king’s body seized.

The veins in his arms went black. His stomach turned. He vomited wine and bile. Flies burst from his mouth. His skin blistered. He clawed at his own throat. Tried to scream.

The doors stayed shut.

The soldier watched.

They found the king in the morning. Dead in his throne. Skin bloated. Mouth open. A swarm of hornets nesting in his throat. No wounds. No sign of poison.

They never found the soldier’s body.

Some say he walked out of the marsh, healed by some pagan god. Others whisper he died on the fourth day and what returned was something else, wearing his face.

The throne was taken by a cousin.

He died a year later, choked to death in his sleep. His mouth stuffed with milk-soaked linen.

Nobody took the crown after that.

The throne room stayed empty.

Except for the nights when the door creaks open. When the flies gather thick. When you can smell the honey.

And if you listen, you might hear it.

A soldier, whispering from a boat in the dark.