Writing 342- Fiction Final
Professor Terry Krueger
Spring term 2003
My hands cracked, my back screamed and my feet flaked and fell apart in soggy white chunks on my bed. The crew moaned and coughed all night and someone in a cot below me rolled over and farted and as the stench slowly rose and lingered at my level I finally broke down. How could they sleep? I watched the moon’s entire cycle that month, escaping from the cabin at nights to the deck, and I could see the full moon blue beaming down through the hatch and into the room. The ladder creaked as I climbed up to the open deck where I could breathe. The moon drowned stars and reflected itself in the distance upon the calm sea and the ship’s mast and sail cast a long silhouette across the water while a warm breeze flapped sail and water in unison. The deck was clogged. Barrels, crates, nets and small boats were stacked and stored in every corner of the massive vessel. There was something like 150 mates on board so every inch of space was valuable territory.
Starboard, I heard a soft crashing of waves in the distance and saw a faint glow near the edge of a large silhouetted cliff. As the warm stench of the dank sleeping cabin seeped out from below deck like a rotting carcass my eyes puckered up like cutting onions and I remember thinking I’d rather die than spend another night down there.
Fuck it. I rolled and large barrel of preserved bacon overboard, it disappeared first then burst up and floated enough for me to plunge in after it. I mounted it like a horse and watched the silhouette of that damn ship drift slowly away towards the edge of the Earth. I wanted it to fall off.
As the sun revolved back around the Earth the next morning, I awoke with sand in my eyes and a sharp sting in my calf. I pulled on a small crab latched to my leg until the stubborn little creature lost its arm. I held its flailing shell to my face, watching its eyes jut back and forth and wondered what pain it felt in loosing that arm. A tiny stream of red dripped from the detached but still clenching claw on my leg and disappeared in the wet sand under me. I pitched the creature to the surf, pried the claw off my calf and stuck it in my pocket. Then I wallowed in the sand and dug my hands and feet into the cold moist under-layers and flung all fours into the air and watched chunks rise, arch, plop and disappear back into the beach. The sun warmed my cracked hands and hairy face and I laid there smelling the sea, hearing the waves break and feeling water and sand surge and creep up and back down my body.
When I came around, tide pools were being refilled, the sun blazed and my face stung from dried salt and sunburn. I felt flakes of crusty skin wilting from my lips like rose pedals and when I pulled on a flake with my teeth and pealed a strip painfully away a stream of blood ran down my chin. It tasted metallic and I felt like a dumb ass for not taking water. I bashed opened the bacon barrel’s lid with a rock and a warm cream of swine and maggots clicked and stared up at me like an oozing wound. The horizon spun around me and pulled at my stomach and behind my eyes as I smelled that nasty barrel until my knees buckled from nausea and dehydration.
When I came to I felt cold steel pressing into my back and my head throbbed like it had been stabbed.
“What’s your business way out here sailor?”
Delirious, I dug my head into a colder, darker layer of sand.
“Listen here boy, your back’s about to look like the inside of that there barrel so you best speak up.”
As I mumbled sand blew in my face, “I’m a prince. A great and powerful prince.”
“Yeah, and I’m a three legged camel. Listen here man, you look like you walked a plank and fought sharks. Now who are you or I’ll let you have it!”
I couldn’t remember. It was all at the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t concentrate. Yeah, the plank…that’s it, I must be a sailor. That sounds familiar. But my throat was too dry to speak and before I could move the bitch sunk her sword into my calf and twisted it like she was poking at a roast to see if the center was still bloody. I shrieked but nothing came out and as I lost consciousness I pictured some beastly hag standing overhead my ragged ass watching blood seep out and stain the sand black.
“You’ve got one more chance man.” She pulled the blade from my flesh and I felt the tip rub lightly up my leg, cut the ass open on my britches and rest again on the small of my back. The sword circled my side stopped on my belly as I flopped over like a beached whale and passed out.
The next thing I can remember is waking up to bright white lace curtains gently blowing in the wind of an open window above me. The breeze tickled and cooled as it blew across my burnt skin. I felt my balls tighten from the crisp air and realized I was naked. Out the window I could hear the same crashing of waves that compelled my jumping ship and I laid there thinking perhaps I had made a bad decision. A tall vase sat beside the bed and as I sat up to reach for it speckles of black twisted in my eyes and clouded my vision and I sunk back down flat. A large jellyfish once stuck to my leg when I was a boy and made me sick and lame for a week. Laying in that bed, my calf throbbed like that same jellyfish was stuck inside and stinging its way out. The pain consumed me.
The same wicked voice that stabbed me on the beach interrupted my dreaming of sex with a cute young servant back at my castle. “Feeling better are you, young prince? You know you lost a lot of blood out there. I see there’s still enough in you for some things though,” she raised her eyebrows at me.
“Where am I, why am I tied to the bed, who are you and what the hell is going on here man, where are my clothes.”
“That’s a lot of questions for a man in your…your position you know.”
“Are you talking to me or my torso or what madam?”
Her face turned as red as mine felt and she walked closer and looked into my eyes.
“You know, I’ve been watching over you for three days now and now you’re awake and speaking and you’re nothing like I imagined. You sound so…so refined.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“What, those rags we found you in? They burned quite nicely with that nasty barrel of slime you were passed out next to. And my God, what a stink you had on you. You weren’t actually eating that shit were you?”
As she turned to walk out the room I jerked my body in its constraints and demanded, “This is outrageous, seriously. I’m no prisoner, seriously damn it, I’m a prince.” The door slammed. The vase of water on the stand next me shattered when I tried to get a handful of to drink and the water spilled across the top end of the bed. I sucked the blankets dry and rested my burning lips on the moisture. I was delirious again, ‘They’re going to torture me,’ I thought, ‘they’re getting me healthy so they can torture me to death I just know it.’
I watched the sun gleam through the window and curtains and light a patch on the opposite wall that faded from top to bottom and eventually disappeared when the sun fell behind the earth for another night. It crept through the window and across my skin as I rolled and pulled my wrists raw at the ropes until I managed to grab a piece of broken vase and saw enough rope to break free. My hands shook. I figured that rather than staying to be tortured or jumping out the window to break my back, I’d go straight out the front door or get killed trying. Using a chair to limp with I tore a curtain from the wall, tied it around my waist and left the room.
A rush of warm air that smelled like roasted chicken smacked me and as I leaned on the chair to breathe deep one leg slipped over the top stair’s edge and I went tumbling awkwardly head over heals to the bottom. For the second time in my life I found myself under the foot and mercy of that beautiful girl. She stood hard on my wound and as I screamed in pain like a child I gave one great sweep with my other leg to kick across the bottom of her feet and take her body out from under her. I wrestled on top before she could recover and pinned her arms above her head. Her hair fell off her face and I saw the sea in her eyes- I froze- and her knee found my crotch and in one powerful thrust I was again eating floor with her standing above me.
My balls throbbed stronger than my leg, for a bit, and before I could fully recover the girl and two men stood above me laughing.
“A prince you say, well you look pretty pathetic to me,” one man mocked as he poked at my flank with a sword. “I wonder what country you will rule.”
“Listen here man, there’s no need to be rude. Florin was a very powerful country last time I checked.”
“Florin you say! Now I know you’re lying. Would you look at this sister, we have the prince of Florin here, the future king, of Florin!” He chuckled.
“Oh Brutus,” she said, “Stop teasing him.
My cheek pressed hard into the floor as I talked, “Look here, I am Maxim Truemann, son of William Truemann the second, King of Florin. I have the family shield branded here under my arm.”
“Don’t move,” Brutus said and lifted my arm with his sword. “Father, you should look for yourself.”
He looked close and stroked at the brand under my arm. “Do you know where you are son?”
“No sir.”
“You’re in the castle of Moniker, Florin’s neighbor to the West and sworn enemy.”
“Well then sir, your name must is King Vincent the third. And that must be the prince, Brutus-Orelius. I didn’t know about a daughter. Listen sir, this really isn’t necessary, I just got a bit lost that’s all.”
King Vincent helped me to a chair and told me the other side of a story I had heard a dozen times from my family about Vancar, his nephew, Brutus’s cousin, being kidnapped and murdered by a member of my family last year.
“But I’m a fair man,” Vincent said, “I’ll give you one chance to live. You and Brutus here will fight. If you win I’ll give you a horse and you can return to Florin. But if you loose…if you loose you’ll never see home again. ”
“Fight Sir? I can’t walk down stairs.”
“Have you ever jousted son?”
“No.”
“I suggest you learn by morning.”
That night Malia volunteered to keep guard my room and after a reluctant Brutus manhandled and shoved me in and locked the door I collapsed on the bed and watched blood soak from my opened wound through the bandage and onto the bed’s white sheet.
Malia looked a wild one- red hair and dark blue eyes, strong long fingernails and stronger longer legs. When she snuck into my room that night I was again at her mercy.
She woke me gently with her hair brushing and tickling lightly up and down my belly and her breath warming my torso.
“You know,” she said softly, “it was me that bathed and shaved you when you were ill.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t move.
She smelled deliciously of lavender. “You looked so vulnerable laying there naked and unconscious and barely alive.”
“What did you do to me that I can’t remember?”
“Nothing really. You were too weak.”
“I’m feeling much stronger.”
She worked her hair from side to side up my belly and chest and by the time it covered my face I was stiff as a board.
“You’re stiff as a board there prince.”
“I’ve been away from women for a long time.” Her gown rode up her hips as she straddled me. Soft hair tickled my thighs and as her warm scent drifted up from below and caught our noses she giggled in my ear and made bumps creep up my spine with her tongue.
I’ll leave the rest to your imagination and say only that that night, while I should have been resting and preparing to save my life, I fell head over heals in love and was drained three times and stopped short of a forth only because the sun peeked its head over Malia’s full-moon ten minutes too soon.
“I really am a prince.” I said as her dress caught on her chest then fell back over her hips to the floor.
“Then win today so we can do this again.”
A small crowd of servants and beggars gathered in the morning to watch Sir Brutus the great smash my head off with his trusty lance. I saw his armor gleam in the distance as he practiced charging and sliding his lance through a small ring hanging from a string. I hardly felt I was about to fight for my life. The ocean hissed over the cliffs that bordered half the castle and birds that nested and clung to the cliff walls sung like a choir. I was thinking about her spread before me moaning like a goddess. Three servants helped tie a solid square iron plate to my chest and before I could show my disapproval over the fairness the armor they slapped a steel helmet over my eyes. The helmet slid down so that all I cold see through the small slit were my dirty bare feet and bloody leg being helped into the stirrups of a saddle mounted on a stumpy brown horse.
“I protest. Seriously man this is preposterous. I can’t move or see and I think this horse is pregnant.”
From behind a fat black man whose face I couldn’t see slid a joust under my right arm and pushing it forward to give me the handle slid dozens of splinters from the shitty old lance into my bicep and armpit. I shrieked in pain, which the servant took as a war cry and slapped my horse’s rear.
My bouncing view of Brutus bearing down on me and leaning in for the kill changed violently to the inside of my helmet when pieces of broken wood struck and dented closed the face guard with a crash so loud my ears throbbed and I couldn’t tell if I was sitting on a horse or on my ass in the dirt. I tried to pull open the face-guard but it was stuck shut and as I dropped the lance still clenched under my arm it struck the horses legs and I suddenly found myself holding its neck and bouncing awkwardly in darkness. The iron and steel tied to me jerked me straight over the horse’s head as it stopped suddenly. In the dirt catching my breath I could hear everyone laughing at me. When I pealed the bent helmet over my sweaty face I was astonished to see that it was not me they were laughing at but Brutus who was stumbling around in circles trying to pull a six foot long splinter of wood out of a hole in the chest of his armor. In the distance a few men chased after his panicked horse. As I untied the thick plate of iron off my chest I saw a small dent precisely where my heart was.
Brutus shook my hand that morning, nobly, and rode out the castle gates with his head down in shame.
*******
The fat ass horse King Vincent gave me collapsed and refused to get up half a day’s walk from the Florence Castle. I felt sorry for the poor beast as its belly heaved and panted in the hot sun. I dripped half of the bladder of water I had into its mouth. “Thanks old buddy for saving my life.”
My leg bled again and when I finally approached the Florin gates the next morning the entire bandage was soaked in red.
“Guard…you there, why are the gates closed?”
“What’s your business here?”
“My business? Listen here man, I’m Maxim Prince of Florin…that’s my business.”
“The prince is dead you chump. He was kidnapped six months ago...his body was found near the river.”
“Chump, man who are you calling chump. What’s your name, I’m going to have you dismembered.”
“Listen chump, my orders are to dump this here barrel of boiling tar on anyone trying to get in the castle so I suggest you just keep your distance.”
“Orders? Who’s orders are those?”
“Why the King’s of course.”
“The King’s? Listen man, let me in or I’ll have you tarred and feathered.”
He spat a wad of tobacco in my direction and said, “You listen here, a band of men from Moniker’s supposed to come through here tonight and orders are to stand hard and make sure nobody gets in that aint supposed to. Now what’s your business here?”
“What’s your name?”
He hesitated. “Orelious.”
“Orelious…Orelious Reed, is that you, you dumb son of a bitch? Man, it’s me Maxim. Listen here man, I stood guard for you two summers ago whilst you off and did Ms. Romano in the royal bath.”
“Why... I don’t believe it. Maxim, it is you! We all thought you were dead. When the King came home not but a month after you disappeared he had the land searched clean till they found a fresh body near the river. Matched your bone structure and all so they just sort of gave up hope and stopped looking.”
“Open the door for shit’s sake.”
I saw faces I had seen a hundred times growing up looking back at me in shock. I felt like a kid again that night Dad and I drank enough wine for that fat black horse to get drunk off for a week and staggered through the village in robes like commoners. Fires glowed warm and sent aromas of wood and roasting meat through the village. Like we often used to, we warmed ourselves with a group of make-shift musicians playing around a small fire. When we left Dad pulled a ring from his finger and tossed it across fire to them.
We walked on, “That’ll feed their families for a month. And what good is it to me? The damn things hurt my fingers.”
“I love you father. You’ll never know what was like those years you were gone.”
“I’m sorry son; I had to find myself out there. I would have gone crazy here if I didn’t leave. I can only imagine what you have gone through.”
“I was doing the same thing you were.”
“Everyone thought you were kidnapped and murdered by Moniker. We even found body near the river. It was so swollen and decayed we couldn’t tell for sure and some- especially your mother- refused to give up hope. As we approached the keep door three guards stopped us with the tips of swords. The King pulled his hood back and they bowed their heads and looked up at me with surprised eyes.
Before we could stagger into the keep to ransack food a commotion at the gate caused a peasant’s tent to catch fire and light up half the courtyard with strange shadows. We were drunk. We grabbed the guards’ swords and as I approached the circle of scuffling men I saw Brutus in the center, stripped naked and flailing in chains and swinging at anything he could reach.
I stood in front of father. “What’s going on here?”
“Maxim, my God, is that you?” The guard in charge said. “My God, it is.
“Yes. What’s going on here?”
“We caught him sneaking in the gate with this under his belt.” A guard held up a glass vile filled with clear liquid.”
I wanted to stab him. I wanted to stab him clean through and watch his guts fall to the dirt before he could collapse. Two guards pulled hard on the chains attached to his legs and after his pecker jerked towards the sky he landed hard on his back in a cloud of dust. A crowd formed around the scene and reminded me of my days of fighting as a kid. Father watched me from behind as I stood over the filthy bloody man gasping for air. People chanted, “Gut him…Hang the bastard...” and although I burned with hatred for him all I could think of was his sister’s eyes crying at the news that her brother had been slain in such a way.
Brutus recognized my face and terror reeked behind his eyes when the guards cornered a scraggly looking dog and forced a bit of the liquid in its mouth. The creature made it a couple strides and collapsed into a violent seizure. It sent the crowd into an uproar and they spit and threw wine and kicked dirt at him and I could see his chest heave in fear as he clenched a large gash dripping red from his forearm. He was helpless and pitiful like a beaten-down dog and as I recognized the same Vincent family face traits his sister had I decided Brutus deserved the same his family gave me.
The crowd gasped as The King lifted the hood of his cloak and stepped forward. The only noise in the square came from some peasants throwing buckets of water on their burning tent. The King drew his sword waist high and towered over Brutus in the dirt like a shadow. He slashed the razor sharpened sword across Brutus’s belly. Women screamed and men cheered and afterward guards drug his carcass out the gates to be eaten by beasts. A wet red streak of blood lead out the square.
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