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The Bandits
III It
begins, as these stories often do, with a blinding headache and a hard-on. Ferdinando’s
morning ride out from the watchtower is a sluggish, surly affair: the rusted
iron of his helm gnaws at the bridge of his nose, and the moldering smell of
his own sweat turns the inside of his armor into a sauna. He lets the other
mercenaries chatter ahead of him, picking lice from their beards and cursing
the sun, while he studies the bruised, ochre sky behind them. The mountains
east of Antioch are ugly in this season, crags lined with the blackened
stubble of last year’s grass fires and puckered with caves. That is
where the bandits nest, the scouts say. By
midday, the patrol finds a shallow valley strewn with olive trees and the
stripped bones of a camel. Ferdinando calls a halt. "The dogs are
close," he says. He means the locals, but a pack of real
dogs—vicious, starved, wolf-colored—prowls the ridgeline above,
waiting for carrion. They
push on, picking through the shale until the lead man spots movement below a
lip of stone. Ferdinando dismounts and signals the others to flank. He keeps
low, stalking forward, and the itch in his groin worsens—whether it's
the pre-battle fear or anticipation, he never knows. The stink of unwashed
man is thick in the air as he creeps up to the cave mouth. He flattens
against the stone and listens: muffled voices, laughter, the clatter of dice. He
bursts in first, sword drawn. The men inside are filthy, bony, with eyes sunk
deep from hunger, but they move quickly. One lunges at him with a crooked
spear. Ferdinando catches the shaft on his shield and drives the point of his
sword through the man’s cheek, splitting lips, teeth, and the roof of
his mouth. The man goes down in a spasm of blood and snot, but the others are
on him at once. He smashes another’s face with his shield, then feels a
blade score his thigh. He lets the pain anchor him, turns and guts the
attacker, hears the meaty slap of entrails on stone. The
entire exchange takes less than a minute. After, Ferdinando paces the cave
with his chest heaving, the violence still fizzing in his nerves. He wipes
his blade on a scrap of burlap, then shouts for his men to bring torches. The
cave goes deep—there will be more. Deeper
in, they find the bandits’ women and children cowering against the back
wall. Ferdinando sees a flicker of gold in the straw: a battered cross,
nailed to a post above the huddle. He laughs. "Christian mercy," he
says, and gestures for his men to collect the boys for labor, the women for
whatever pleasure can be wrung from them before sale. The
next days are monotonous and brutal. Every cave in this stretch of mountains
yields the same: old men, mothers, howling brats and a meager haul of coins
and knives. Ferdinando grows bored, then irritable. On the fourth morning, a
scout reports a clutch of bandits sighted moving through a chasm to the
north. “They
have a captain with them. Large man. Wears a wolf pelt.” Ferdinando
bares his teeth. “Then let’s hunt.” The
chase lasts through the night, across shingle fields and up into a limestone
canyon so narrow the sky is just a seam overhead. His mercenaries close the
mouth of the canyon while Ferdinando leads three up the rim. He circles
around, sliding down shale on his ass, and comes at the bandits from above. They
are sleeping. He drops onto their fire, scattering embers, and sets about his
work. He pins the captain first, knocking the breath from him, and rips away
the pelt. The man’s eyes are pale, ringed in soot—he smells of
garlic and horse piss. He claws at Ferdinando’s face, then bites his
wrist, hard. Ferdinando bellows, jams a knee into the man’s belly, and
smashes his temple with the pommel of his sword. The
others surrender quickly. Ferdinando ties their hands with strips of their
own tunics. He strips the captain naked, finds that even limp and filthy, the
man is hung like a donkey. He prods it with the tip of his sword, then laughs
and tells the others to get a fire going. “Tonight, we feast. In the
morning, we impale them.” Ferdinando
takes his pleasure first. He presses the captain, face-down, against the
rough stone, and grinds his cock in with slow, deliberate force. The man
shudders but makes no sound. The taste of blood and grit is in Ferdinando’s
mouth; he hisses and curses in Latin, then in Greek, and at the last moment,
pulls out to spatter the man’s back. He pushes off, wipes himself on
the man’s matted hair, and stands to watch his mercenaries use the
others. The
impalement is crude. Ferdinando likes it that way. They strip the prisoners
naked, bind their ankles to stakes, and set a long, sharpened pole upright
between their legs. He orders the captain last, the man’s cock still
swollen from the beating and the rape. Ferdinando kneels, bites the
man’s earlobe, and whispers: “This is for the horses you took
from us.” He pushes the stake into the man’s anus and twists. The
captain grunts, teeth gritted, and Ferdinando watches with interest as the
wood disappears inch by inch. He has his men lift the pole, and the
man’s body slides further down, tearing its own canal. Ferdinando
admires the bloody foam at the man’s mouth, the way the eyes roll back. They
leave the impaled bandits for the vultures. Ferdinando sleeps that night with
the captain’s wolf pelt over his shoulders, dreaming of something cold
and dark and endless. In the
morning, there is an ambush. It
happens as Ferdinando is pissing against a boulder, groggy from wine and
meat. He senses, more than hears, a footstep behind him. He turns, dick still
in hand, and a fist catches him in the side of the head. He goes down hard, a
flash of stars in his skull. The next blows come fast: rib, kidney, side of
the neck. He tastes iron. When he blinks the blood from his eyes, he sees
only sandaled feet, brown and callused, and the glint of curved blades. Someone
hauls him upright. He is face to face with a giant of a man—taller even
than Ferdinando, chest like a barrel, eyes black and bottomless as old wells.
His beard is thick, and his scalp is shorn, showing a wreath of scars around
the crown. The man says, “Baahir,”
thumping his own chest. Then he pulls a cord tight around Ferdinando’s
wrists and drags him up the canyon wall. The
ascent is a blur of pain and dust. Ferdinando’s feet are bare now, his
toes split and raw on the scree. His hands are
bound behind him, shoulders torqued to agony. Baahir’s
men walk with the grace of wild dogs, pausing now and then to jab the
prisoners with sticks or to laugh at their stumbling. At a
ledge, they stop. Baahir shoves Ferdinando to his
knees, then stands over him, considering. His nose is hooked, the nostrils
flared like a horse’s; his teeth are long and yellow. Ferdinando meets
his gaze with hate, but Baahir just laughs, the
sound deep and throaty. “You
are a cruel man,” Baahir says in Greek, the
accent thick. “My friends are dead because of you.” Ferdinando
spits. “They were thieves. Worse.” Baahir smiles wider. “But you are the best thief.
You took their dignity before you took their lives.” He leans in,
breath hot and sour. “We will teach you a lesson, Lord Franj.” Ferdinando
expects torture, perhaps mutilation, but when Baahir’s
hands close on his throat, he realizes what is coming. Baahir
drags him up, chest to chest, and grinds his hips forward. The erection is
monstrous, straining the filthy linen. Ferdinando tries to jerk away, but the
other men pin his arms, force his legs open with their knees. Baahir spits in his face, then rams the head of his cock
against Ferdinando’s lips. “You
like to do this to boys?” Baahir says.
“Open.” Ferdinando
clenches his jaw, but Baahir just slaps
him—once, twice, open-handed, until his ears ring. Baahir’s
men force his mouth open, fingers digging into his cheeks. The cock drives
in, gagging him. Baahir rocks his hips, fucking Ferdinando’s
mouth with obscene slowness, his eyes never leaving Ferdinando’s.
“You want to bite?” he says softly. “You want to die with
no tongue?” Ferdinando
chokes on the threat, the flesh. Baahir pulls out,
only to slap him again, then shoves the cock in deeper, ramming past the gag
reflex. Ferdinando retches. Snot and tears run down his chin. Finally
Baahir withdraws, smears his cock across Ferdinando’s
face, and steps back. “Next,” he calls. The
other men laugh and come forward, eager. They turn Ferdinando over, tear his
tunic down, expose his white, goose-fleshed ass. The first man is quick, the
second brutal. Ferdinando grunts with every thrust, but refuses to cry out.
The third man spits in his ear, then bites the nape of his neck as he takes
him. They push him down, one after another, until the crack of his ass is a
slick of blood and semen. Baahir watches, arms folded, his own cock softening. When
the last man is finished, he steps forward, yanks Ferdinando up by the hair.
“Now you learn humility.” They drag
him to the camp. The rest of the day is spent staked out, face-down in the
sun, flies crawling over his wounds, the laughter of the bandits always at
his back. Once, a boy squats to piss on him, and the stream stings the ragged
flesh of his thighs. They
let him lie there, shivering, while Baahir
supervises his men hacking branches from the scrub trees. He knows
what’s coming before they haul him to his feet: the pole, sharpened to
a wicked point, smoothed with grease and animal fat. They
drag him to a dead patch of earth, where nothing grows and the ground is
cracked and hard. Baahir grins at him, raises a
hand, and the men flip Ferdinando onto his stomach again, knees and elbows
pressed into the dirt. He
sees the shadow of the pole swing over his head, then feels the cold kiss of
wood at his asshole. Baahir leans down and hisses,
“Just like you did to my brother, you pig.” They
work the pole in slow, using their weight and boots to drive it through. The
first inches are agony, splitting skin and forcing muscle apart, but
that’s nothing compared to when the wood punches through the ruined
ring of his ass, up into the gut, and begins to lever his insides apart.
There’s a terrible moment where he feels his own cock grind into the
earth, trapped between his belly and the ground, and he thinks he might come
from the pain alone. He
bites his tongue clean through so he doesn’t scream. Blood fills his
mouth and trickles out his nose. The men curse and jeer, some whistling, some
beating their cocks as they watch. One brings a bucket of warm piss and dumps
it over Ferdinando’s head. The
pole meets resistance at the ribcage, but Baahir
wants it to go higher. They plant a boot between Ferdinando’s shoulder
blades and pound the stake with a stone mallet, splitting bone and cartilage
until the sharpened tip bursts from just below his collarbone, slick with
blood and yellow fat. By
now, Ferdinando is halfway gone, vision grey, ears ringing. But Baahir isn’t finished. He barks orders, and the men
haul the pole upright, lifting Ferdinando’s weight with it. His arms
dangle, body impaled like a beetle on a pin. They plant the base of the pole
in a mound of rocks and pack dirt around it, making sure it stands straight. For a
second, Ferdinando thinks he’s going to black out. But the sun is hot,
and the air so sharp it hurts to breathe, and the pain is everywhere,
endless, complete. He hears the men laughing and playing dice for the rags
they stripped off him. Baahir stands at the base of
the pole and looks up. “How does it feel, Ferdinando? Not so tough now,
eh?” Ferdinando
gurgles blood, manages a mouthful of spit, and hawks it down at Baahir’s feet. The man roars and throws a rock,
catching Ferdinando in the jaw and splitting his lip to the bone. But Ferdinando
just grins, eyes wild with hate and the mad joy of survival. He licks the
blood from his lips and shows his teeth, still laughing even as the sun bakes
him and the pain climbs higher, burning away everything but the animal inside
him. The
bandits load up their mules and disappear into the haze. Ferdinando is alone
on the hill, staked high above the valley floor, cock and balls shriveled in
the wind, his body leaking blood and shit and rage. The
sun crawls across the sky, slow as torture. The first night is the worst. The
flesh around the pole swells and pinches, nerves screaming as the splintered
wood drinks his blood. Ferdinando’s arms go numb, then tingle, then
throb as they hang useless at his sides. Every breath shudders up the length
of the stake, jarring the shattered wreckage of his insides. By the
second day, the sun’s heat turns everything to glue. Sweat beads on his
forehead and evaporates before it can run down his face. The open wounds on
his thighs scab over, then crack and run again. Flies discover him, clouding
around his cock and the leaking mess of his asshole, laying eggs in every
crease. They buzz inside his mouth and nostrils, drinking the blood and spit
as it pools. He can’t swat them away; he can’t do anything but
bare his teeth and wait for the next round. They
return in the afternoon, half a dozen of the bandits, not Baahir
this time but one of the skinny ones with a harelip and eyes too close
together. They bring wine and chunks of salted meat, which they eat sitting
in the shade, passing the bottle and pissing on the rocks below. Harelip
cups his hands around his mouth and shouts up to Ferdinando. “Hey, you
still alive up there, big man?” Ferdinando
works up a lump of spit and fires it down. It falls short, landing in a cloud
of dust. The men laugh. “We’re
taking bets,” Harelip says, “on whether your cock’s still
working. Maybe you want to show us, eh?” The
others howl, jeering. Ferdinando growls something low and nasty, but his voice
is more frog than man now. Harelip
shrugs. “You’ll be dead soon. Maybe we help you along.” They
climb up to the base of the pole, kicking at the packed dirt. One bandit
pokes at Ferdinando’s foot with a stick, making the whole pole sway.
Pain shoots through his guts, white-hot and electric. Harelip
draws a knife, thin as a fishbone, and slices a ring of flesh around Ferdinando’s
balls. “Last time you used these, you fucked my cousin,” he says,
not even angry, just stating a fact. “She said you had a real pretty
one.” He
yanks the sack, hard, and saws through the cords, throwing the clump of meat
into the dust. Blood pours down the pole in ropes. The dogs, bony and
black-eyed, race in to fight for the prize. One eats it whole and pisses on
the rock in triumph. Ferdinando
screams then, raw and ragged, a sound that burns the back of his throat and
the inside of his skull. His vision goes to fireworks—red, then blue,
then nothing. When he wakes, the bandits are gone, and the sun is setting in
a halo of flies. He
lasts another night. The moon is gone, replaced by a black sky and a cold
wind. His body swells on the stake, leaking pus and yellow fluids. The dogs
come and go, licking the ground around him, sometimes barking at the shadows. He
thinks of Bertrand, his old friend. Of the time they raided an Arab camp and
spent the night splitting a boy between them, betting who could make him cry
louder. He wonders if Bertrand would laugh at him now, or just finish the job
out of mercy. He
thinks of his mother, but only to curse her name for birthing him in this
shithole of an island. By
morning, his heart can’t keep up. The pain is everywhere, but
it’s fading, like a song played softer and softer until there’s
nothing left but memory. He
feels himself slip, mind detaching from the wrecked meat of his body, and for
a moment he’s back at sea, a boy on a boat, salt wind in his face and
the smell of fish guts and diesel in the air. Then
nothing. The
sun climbs, indifferent. The flies lay their eggs and the beetles go to work.
By the third day, vultures find the carcass. They strip the eyes first, then
the tongue, then the soft fat from the belly. Baahir returns, alone, and stands at the base of the pole.
He watches the body twist in the breeze, a broken effigy, cockless
and chewed by dogs. He spits once, pisses in the dirt, and leaves without a
word. The
pole stands for a month, maybe more, until the rains come and the flesh melts
from the bone. The dogs dig up the scraps and carry them into the hills. In the
end, there’s nothing left but the stake, blackened by sun and blood,
planted in the dead earth. |
