|
The Bandits
IV Ferdinando da Siracusa wakes to the taste of
blood and the throb of a shattered jaw. His wrists are tied, rough rope
biting deeper with every shift of his bulk. He’s on his knees, surrounded
by mud, piss, and laughter—a ring of thieves and whoresons with half
their teeth rotted out, their blades drawn and their eyes bright. Their
leader has a nose like a split plum and speaks only in shouts. They hate him.
He can feel it in their boots, in every jab to his ribs, every spit that
lands on his face. They strip him. Not gentle. They want the show. Rip his tabard, yank
his pants, tear the linen from his belly, then his balls. They laugh at his
cock, swollen from the beating, purple with bruises. One jabs it with a
stick. “Christ, what’s he feeding that thing?” they say.
“No wonder he’s such a prick.” Ferdinando spits a bloody thread and smiles, baring teeth that still
hold despite it all. “Hope your mothers choke on it when I come
back.” They don’t like that. Two of them haul him up by the arms,
tearing at his shoulders, and another shoves a finger up his ass for good
measure, searching for hidden coin. “Think you’ll come back,
pig?” says the one with the finger. “You’re going
down.” Down, down into the pit. He’s seen the stone mouth
before—cistern, some old Roman shit, wide as a carriage, black as sin.
He never thought he’d meet it from this angle. They drag him to the
lip, boots skidding on the moss. He smells the wet rot before he sees what
waits at the bottom. The pit seethes. Not water, not rats, not even shit. Snakes. Dozens.
Pale and fat, black and skinny, every kind, all tangled, hissing in the dark.
He hears a bandit shout: “For the snakes!” Another: “He
fucked my brother in the ass!” The push is quick but not merciful. He drops like a rock. The air is
cooler down here. He lands hard, knocks his knees, splits his scalp on stone,
but he’s a bastard and he grits his teeth. The first snake finds him in
a heartbeat—slides under his thigh, latches onto the meat of his inner
leg. The pain is instant, pure fire, like someone jamming a dagger straight
through muscle and pumping in molten iron. Ferdinando howls, kicks, which
only brings more. They swarm. It’s a banquet. His ankles, his ass, his armpits,
every inch of exposed skin—everywhere, teeth like shards of glass, a
thousand little mouths chewing and spitting venom. The pain rides up, up, up
his groin. The first bite on his cock comes sudden, blunt, right on the tip.
For a second he thinks he’ll vomit from the shock. He tries to roll
away, but the pit is too small, the floor alive. The snakes crawl over him,
fuck him with their tongues, bite and bite and bite. He screams till his voice is gone, just a gasping croak. The venom
burns, then numbs, then burns again. His cock swells to double size, purple
then black, the veins standing out like ropes. His balls go next, bitten
three, four times, each bite a nail in the sack. He can’t even feel his
legs anymore, can’t move, but the rest of him is screaming. He tries to
piss on them out of spite, but nothing comes. Every heartbeat is agony. The bandits above watch for a while, tossing torches down to see the
show. “Take it, you fuck!” one yells. Another laughs so hard he
pisses herself. They throw stones, bits of bread, even a dead rat. The snakes
don’t care. They only care about him. Time stretches, breaks. He loses count of the bites, of the hours. His
skin goes cold, but the inside of him is on fire. He thinks of Bertrand, that
shithead, probably drinking and fucking somewhere, not knowing that his
friend is dying in a fucking snake pit. He thinks of Barbath,
that Arab bastard—maybe he’d have liked to watch this. Maybe
he’s behind it. His vision swims. His cock is one huge wound, split at the head,
leaking blood and venom. The snakes are bored of him now, content to curl up
on his bloated thighs, flicking tongues at his face. He tries to bite one
back, but his jaw is broken. He tries to curse the world, but only a wet
gargle escapes. A coldness creeps from his toes. It’s a relief, honestly. The
numb spreads, higher, higher, past his gut, up his chest. His heart slows,
the beats further apart, softer. He can’t feel his arms. He can’t
feel the pit. He thinks, just for a moment, of Bertrand, and then spits that thought
away. The last thing he hears is a snake, sliding inside his ear. The last thing he sees is the darkness, closing, like an asshole. When the cold reaches his heart, Ferdinando da Siracusa
is already gone. V He should have expected it. The fuckers never did anything by half,
not when they could go all the way. The bandits who drag Ferdinando
don’t care that his body is a mass of half-healed scars, that he reeks
of rot and venom and his cock is black at the tip. They tie him to a tree
anyway, using rope sticky with someone else’s blood, and they laugh at
his limp, swollen balls swinging in the cold air. They strip him slow this time, no hurry. One plays with his cock,
slaps it until it twitches, pulls the skin back and forth to see how much
blood is left in it. “Good enough,” says the leader “He can
still feel it.” They bring out the honey by the bucket. Not just honey—syrup,
lard, crushed fruit, poured over his head till his hair is a mat of sugar and
yeast. They paint his chest, his arms, the lines of his ribs, slather it on
his cock and balls till the hair is matted down and the skin is glazed.
“Like a cake,” one says, and the others agree, jabbing fingers
into every crease, every hole, laughing when the goo drips into his ass. Ferdinando grits his teeth and calls them all bastards, which makes
them laugh harder. Someone smacks his face and tells him to say “thank
you.” He spits instead, but his mouth is dry and the spit is thick as
honey. They leave him there, arms spread, ankles lashed to roots, balls
swinging low, the king of the fucking forest. At first, the sun just bakes him, makes the sugar crawl in his pores.
He thinks of escape, but the ropes are tight and the wood behind his back is
studded with old nails and splinters. He can’t piss, can barely move
his toes, and every breath brings a taste of yeast and rot. He waits for
wolves, or maybe a bear. It’s the ants that come first. Tiny, black, and unstoppable, they find him by the hundred, then by
the thousand. They tunnel under the honey, into his armpits, his ears, his
ass crack. They get between his teeth, in his nostrils, in the slit of his
cock. He can’t scream because he’ll choke, so he bites his tongue
and grunts and tries to kick, but the ropes only bite deeper. The wasps come next. They love the fruit, the beer, the sweat. They
land on his lips, crawl into his mouth, sting the inside of his cheek. They
cluster around his cock, which is now bright red and ballooning with every
bite. The venom is electric shock. His body shivers. His balls go tight
against the base of his cock, which lifts, then lifts again, then stands hard
as a club. The bandits were right: he can still feel it. Every sting sends a
jolt up his spine, and his body won’t stop betraying him, getting hard,
leaking, even as the bugs eat him alive. The bites don’t stop. The hours pass, marked by the sun’s
slow crawl. His skin is all welts, his eyes swollen shut, lips three times
the size and drooling with blood and honey. He can feel the ants under his
skin, digging, chewing. The wasps have stripped half the flesh from the head
of his cock, which still throbs. Every breath is a gasp. His heart is racing
but weak. He tries to curse, but it’s just a mumble now. Sometimes the
bandits wander by, pissing at the base of the tree, laughing. Once, one of
them jerks off at the sight of him, comes in the dirt, says, “Good
show, big man.” By night, the agony is everything. He’s shivering, feverish,
cock still standing. The bandits light a fire and sing. Ferdinando hangs in
the dark, half-dead, more bug than man. He hallucinates: sees Bertrand, sees Barbath, sees the faces of everyone he ever killed or
fucked or both, all swarming him like the bugs. His cock is leaking blood and
honey, the wasps still at it, relentless. His balls are the size of oranges,
covered in welts. The ants have gone deeper, and now his insides itch and
burn. He knows he’s dying. He feels it in the cold that creeps up, the
numbness in his fingers, the slowing of his breath. But his cock is still
hard, and the shame of that is worse than the pain. He wants to curse God,
but can’t remember the words. Instead, he drools, and the bugs eat his
tongue. By dawn, the bandits are gone, or maybe just passed out. His body is
almost empty—a sack of welts, a hard-on, a hollow chest. The insects
don’t care. They keep eating. His heart stutters, stops, starts again.
He tries to open his eyes but can’t. The last thing he feels is a wasp
crawling into the slit of his cock, stinging him deep, and then a rush of
piss and blood and honey, hot and final. He dies hard, tied to the tree, cock up, head slumped forward. The
bugs feast for days, and the forest animals take what’s left. The ropes
rot away, but his bones stay there, the skull grinning, balls dangling, cock
bone rising, a monument to all the shit that mattered to him. VI They tie him upright to a stake driven in the hard-packed earth, arms
yanked behind, wrists lashed in rawhide so tight it bites through skin. The
sun is straight overhead, white-hot and spitting in his eyes. Someone ripped
his clothes away the moment they wrestled him off his horse, and now
there’s nothing to shield the raw meat of his body from the gaze of the
mob. It is not the first time Ferdinando da Siracusa
has felt the wind on his cock and balls in front of strangers. It is,
however, the first time he’s been naked and helpless with no hope of
rescue, every last one of his men in pieces behind the ridge. Baahir stands directly
in front of him, not five paces off, bow in hand and a quiver slung across
the hairy slab of his back. The other Arabs make a ring, but it is Baahir who does the talking. He spits in the dirt at
Ferdinando’s feet and circles the post, eyes tracking over
Ferdinando’s cock, the bulge of his belly, the thick hair splayed over
his chest. The look in the bastard’s eyes is pure animal: a hyena at a
chained bull. For a moment, Baahir lets his fingers
drag over Ferdinando’s shoulder, then down to the bend of his arm,
testing the muscle, feeling the pulse. He grins and leans in, close enough
for Ferdinando to smell the garlic and sweat on his breath. “I saw you once, in Edessa. Fucking a priest to death in a
market stall,” Baahir says, voice low,
mocking. “I knew then: one day you’d hang like a pig for
me.” Ferdinando laughs, thick spit flecking his lips. “Go on, you
little fuck, cut my balls off if it makes you feel big.” Baahir’s grin widens. He
draws an arrow, black-fletched, and fits it to the bow. “No, Christian.
Better. Much, much better.” The first arrow is a joke, almost playful: it catches Ferdinando in
the side, a handspan above the hip, piercing the
meat just deep enough to stick. A shallow wound, nothing fatal, more
humiliation than harm. Baahir does not give him the
pleasure of a real scream; he moves along the circle, flinging insults with
each step, describing in vivid detail the way Christian knights squeal when
their bowels spill out. The second arrow comes from behind, angled so it
punctures the swell of Ferdinando’s belly and lodges in the soft undergut. This one hurts. He grits his teeth and
shudders, sweat pouring down the creases of his face and neck, the taste of
blood growing sweet in his mouth. He has been hurt before, often by choice, often for fun. But this is
different. Every new arrow is a cold nail, a message: You are done. You are
meat now. You are nothing. “Shoot my cock, you shit-eater,” he says, voice hoarse.
“Do it, if you’re not a coward.” Baahir nods, almost
respectfully, and lines up the next shot. He does not miss. The arrowhead
punches through the left side of Ferdinando’s scrotum and out the
other, splitting it with such suddenness that at first he feels only a hard
thud, like a knee to the balls. Then the fire comes. He roars and jerks, but
the ropes hold. The men around the ring bellow and cackle, stamping their
feet in the dust. Baahir puts another arrow through
the shaft of Ferdinando’s cock, pinning it to his thigh. The pain is so complete it numbs him. The world floats. He looks down and
sees the blood coursing over his groin in black rivers, soaking the sand at
his feet, and even then he cannot help but grin at the ugliness of it. He
looks Baahir dead in the eyes and spits out a chunk
of tooth. “Motherfucker,” he says. Baahir unstrings his
bow and walks up, close enough that the hair on their arms brush together. He
runs a thumb along the split cock, squeezing it, twisting the arrow so the
torn flesh widens and dark blood fountains out. Baahir’s
pupils are huge, eating up the color in his eyes. He undoes the laces of his
own pants, letting his cock flop out heavy and ready, and strokes it as he
watches Ferdinando writhe. Ferdinando wants to bite, wants to scream, wants to spit another
insult, but the pain is a thick, choking cloud now. He shivers and gags, puke
rolling over his lips and down his chest. Baahir
laughs, jerks himself with rough efficiency, and comes in thick ropy spurts
all over Ferdinando’s ruined cock and belly. “Yours is the only cock I ever wanted, Crusader,” Baahir whispers, close to his ear. “Now you can
keep it forever.” He tucks himself away, slaps Ferdinando’s cheek with an open
palm, and steps back. The other men drag a wineskin over and douse
Ferdinando’s wounds in cheap acid wine, shrieking with laughter as he
convulses. The sun keeps climbing. The flies come, and the little birds,
pecking at the blood pooling at his feet. The men eat, drink, and eventually
ride away, leaving him upright in the sand, cock holed and balls shredded,
pinned like a sainted relic for the desert to gnaw. He lives until sunset. He does not beg. He does not pray. He thinks
only of the last night he spent in Palermo, rutting in the dark with a
Templar whose name he never learned, and he dies with a crooked smile still
pulling at his lips. At dawn, the scavenger dogs dig up what’s left of his balls and
carry them off into the rocks. The rest of Ferdinando da Siracusa
slumps limp against the post, eyes eaten out by the night birds, cock and
arrows and all. |
