[fic] leave the bare bones behind

[irrelevant]

leave the bare bones behind
the old guard (comics) | e | yusuf/nicolò | ~13.5k words
Once upon a time, they killed each other often, for reasons. This is often, once upon. Not so much for reasons.


n: comics canon, no film. not your thing? now’s the time to opt out.






There are only so many ways to stab or slash open a body without the act of stabbing or slashing becoming repetitive.

Thirty deaths, a few more, and after that you can’t say with certainty: yes, this many times ago was the time he first put his sword into my gut and dragged the blade upwards into my diaphragm rather than down into my pelvis.

You’ve died that way. Either way. So many times you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve died either of those exact deaths.

You recover. Your enemy recovers. The fissures in your bodies heal without scarring.

Minds are another matter. There is nothing here to touch, nothing to see.

Move along.

He stumbles back and away from the trajectory of your sword. But not from the thrust of your secondary blade.

An advantage of not using a two-handed grip: your secondary weapon is not always or only your secondary weapon. He rarely sees it coming, though he’s experienced the end result so many times.

How many, how many.

It’s not the fault of a longsword that it should be the nature of its owner made tangible. Hack and stab. He doesn’t go around when he can go through.

This time is the time that counts, the only time that counts. Until the next time.

This is for now: your knife driven into a space between two of his ribs. His free hand is wrapped around your forearm in a mockery of a warrior’s clasp.

You let it happen. You offer no resistance and you see vague surprise in eyes made glassy by coming death.

It’s a relief to be pulled in. To be spitted on a sword the inside of you knows better than it has any lover is less troublesome than most of the lovers themselves.

Oh, but here is a troublesome thing. It troubles you that it troubles you not at all that you know, and have known, and will continue to know your enemy’s sword more intimately than you have many a man who’s shared a bed or a pallet or even a convenient wall with you, to date.

Thoughts move strangely when you are dying. This one may last for ever. The next? Blink and you’ll miss it.

Blink.

And you will think a thing or several things so stupid you will not understand why you think them even as you do think them. You will think.

That your enemy’s eyes are — ah, well, that they are too pale for a living man. A ghost’s eyes, not quite any colour, translucent in that random way old Roman glass has of refracting late day sunlight slanted across an Old City souq.

You’ll think that he’s dying again. Your enemy is dying in your arms, and you are dying in his, held close to him by his hand and the thrust of his sword into your gut. His mouth is cracked along bloody lines, red from heat and dehydration. It’s easy to imagine that his mouth exists less than a handspan away in opposition to your own mouth.

The opposing side to thought’s coin is fact: the combined stench of the pair of you is the stench of repeated death in a desert land. You care less about the smell than you do the way his eyes lose their focus as he leaves you alone again.

You bear witness to his death and you let him fall. You let the sword be pulled out of you by that fall. Pain spills, filling the jagged spaces the sword left empty. Overflowing them. Engulfed, you fall as well.

You don’t remember dying, but you must. You come back.

He is gone. So is the camel you acquired two days ago.

Your knife has been left behind. You look at the blood smeared over it, drying on it, then you cut your arm with it. The wound closes up in a matter of moments.

Some time after the time for ‘isha has passed, you sit near (though not too near) to your small dung fire. The camel was useful for that at least.

You take up the knife and you clean the blade well while you listen as jackals call to one another across a not so very distant distance. As you scour the last hint of blood from steel, you wonder yet again. Is it in your blood, then? This thing that is in you, that is in him.

Is it of you, of either of you? Are you both of it?

Your mind is too unquiet for logic or for sleep. The taste of the desert sits ever present in your mouth. Sand catches at the back of your throat when you swallow, stretches away from you on all sides. You get up from where you crouch beside the remains of the fire, and you walk.

You walk the night down into day, over and again until you collapse, then you lie where you fall until you die. You come back to yourself with no echo of your previous end remaining in your flesh, and no answers.

You get up again and walk. Why not? You have legs and feet enough, and shoes into the bargain. He did not take those, at least.

 
+
 

You’ve not seen rain such as this before. It doesn’t fall so much as pour endless walls of water down wherever there is nothing to impede them. There is no way around, only through. There is no way to avoid it but to get out of it.

Those who don’t have that option come and go like players in a pantomime, half glimpsed behind dense liquid hangings. You duck out of the way of a boy prodding a reluctant bullock forward with a stick, followed by a crowd of voluble ladies, whose garments catch your eye. The colours are jewel bright, the cloth unworn — not everyday wear, for daily work.

The women move slowly through the still busy streets. They are at leisure but sure of their way, as though returning home after a pleasurable departure from their daily routines. Wet fabric clings to hair and skin, wrinkles up where drowned clothing and flesh meet. Henna-traced hands push disheveled cloth back into place, only for it to come tumbling down again amidst shrieks of laughter. They push apart from each other in a clash of bangles and chains, then clump back together, masses of gleeful colour bled out by colourless water, all sound and shape without definition.

Their obvious enjoyment makes you smile.

It is haram, of course, but you find that you wish to draw their joy. The artwork of these lands, cave paintings and reliefs and sculptures, the temples covered in carven scenes real enough that they almost seem to move... it all makes your hands itch for a charcoal stick and a flat surface.

If your fingers would but yield something other than geometric shapes and patterns, then you could capture the likeness of these who are now before you as they are in this moment, recreate on fabric or perhaps carve into wood the ease of their shared enjoyment. You’d colour your scene the same way the rain has coloured the land: water-washed and dripped down, soothing as a cool wind rifling its way into a house shut up against a sand storm’s incursions.

Here, monsoon is a blessing to be celebrated, the same way any rain at all is a blessing in a desert. After a second week of little but rain, though, and streets that run like rivers, there is less celebration and more vague hope that the livestock don’t manage to drown themselves overnight.

You pull the hood of your cloak down over your own face, and you try to remember the last time you were this wet, if ever.

Was it the squall over the ocean the last time but one you took ship? That ill-fated Ramadan in the Toodros during which the pair of you died so many times that by the end of it you’d not a single piece of clothing between you that wasn’t shredded and soaked through with blood and water alike?

But it is too much mental effort to place a time or a location you will forget within the year. Once one has spent ten years pursuing and being pursued from one end of the red and black lands to the other by a pestilential, undying franj, any smaller time periods or less interesting events cease to make much impact by comparison.

In these climes, the chase runs differently. Unlike the desert crouched to either side of the Nile strip, much of life south of the Ganges breathes water-rich air. The wet green of monsoon fills the senses, drowning out all else.

It makes pursuit both simpler and more difficult. It makes your life more interesting.

You wonder sometimes how he views your conjoined yet separate existence. Most times you prefer not to. Better to roll over and go back to sleep than to disturb your mind with thoughts that will guarantee no sleep at all. Now and again you can’t help but wonder, though, for all the good it does you. He has no sense of humour, your enemy, and a face like a stone sphinx.

It’s his turn this time round. You came back first last time, were the first to run. You’re satisfied with this current, transient destination, if only for the thought that monsoon at least is complicating his life that much more.

Life will continue to be complicated a while yet. The lands you now travel through teeter on the cusp of winter, you suppose, though you can’t be sure. You’ve lost the thread of the world’s time. You stand outside of it now. You are outside, peering in at a simulacrum of life as you once knew it.

One advantage there is in standing apart: you can see who stands alongside you.

You dream of women the likes of whom you’ve never imagined, and of a man you’ve never seen in daylight. The women are always together. The man joins them at times. Not always, or even often. They seem as happy to be with him as without him.

He does not seem happy to be anywhere, with anyone.

Your enemy is not happy either, not unless he is plunging a steel blade into some vulnerable portion of your anatomy. Or so first hand experience indicates. But then, you wouldn’t know, would you, what he does or doesn’t do when he is not plunging steel blades into you. You see him only with your eyes, not with your dreaming mind.

It’s a blessing. Or it is deprivation. You can never decide which. Not until you see him again, and then? Then you know.

The answer is never the same. Even as a knife point pricks your ribs and a hand settles at your back, pushing you away from the street, still you don’t know the answer. You don’t know until you are out of the rain, your back pressed against the interior wall of the almost empty stable adjacent to your inn. Surrounded by the familiar scents of horses and dried grasses, and by the familiar scent of him.

He doesn’t savour as strongly of horse and sweat as he usually does. You aren’t accustomed to encountering him after he’s had his bath. Neither are you accustomed to the bare outline of his jaw and throat. He’s shaved himself clean, and recently. You look down at the knife prodding your diaphragm, then back up into his improbable ghost’s eyes.

You speak to him in the western traders’ tongue. ‘You didn’t have to bathe for me. I don’t judge. Unless, of course, you are an invading Frankish barbarian. In that case I will feel free to judge, and then to cut your throat afterwards.’ You offer him a smile.

He blinks, offering nothing more in return. Years of knowing him without knowing much anything of him aside from his place of origin, and you’re still unsure if he understands you when you speak Sabir. He’s clever enough that he might just be that good at hiding himself.

Your clever, ghost-eyed enemy. His skin is slick with rain, as is yours, the lot of your clothing and his soaked to dripping.

‘Is this going to take long?’ you ask. ‘I would like to return to my room and get out of these clothes. Though, if you would rather I do it here-’

‘Basta,’ he spits. ‘Non ti zittisci mai?’

He looks and sounds so disgruntled, poor man. Like a cat dropped into a deep bath, who is then unable to get up enough traction to jump or climb out of it, and keeps sliding back down the slippery inner sides, claws scrabbling.

You can’t help yourself; you grin at him. ‘It speaks! Truly, God has been kind to me today. You must know I live for these rare moments in which you appear like a demon from the aether, only to grunt unintelligibly at me.’

His face, alhamdulillah. He is a marvel of nature when driven past stoicism into bewilderment.

You laugh and laugh, and then laugh some more. You laugh until he looks crazed with uncertainty, until he fists your tunic and yanks you in. Your beard grazes his clean-shaven chin when he turns his head.

‘You are much too tall,’ you inform him. ‘Shall I do something about it for you? My knife is very sharp and your feet will doubtless grow back.’

He grunts a response you cannot begin to parse. He grips your tunic so tight that something creaks. The fabric, or perhaps even his bones. His knife never wavers.

‘Fa che sia adesso,’ he mutters. That’s what it sounds like. His breath gusts across your skin when he speaks. You shiver once before stilling yourself.

‘If you are going to,’ you tell him, ‘then do it. I don’t have my sword and these trousers are beginning to chafe.’

He makes a stuttered sound, rough and rusted. It takes you far too many moments to comprehend that he’s laughing.

While you stare at him with your mouth dropped open, he takes the opportunity to stab you in the same place you last stabbed him: high and left, up under your ribs into your heart. He catches you as you begin to fall and holds you steady, never once looking away from your face.

‘You... owe me. Three horses and... a camel,’ you get out. You die in his arms. Again, for however many tens of times this makes.

When you become aware of having rejoined the living, you find yourself sat propped against the wall of a relatively clean, empty stall. He’s gone, per his usual.

He has not, according to the stable master, left you either your horse or his own, or any horse at all.

The repetition is unmistakable, five times now. It’s become a very irritating habit. You will have to break him of it before it grows any worse in practise.

Your father always did say the Genovesi were known for two things in particular: their parsimony and their ability to get the best of any bargain. You fear that in this instance your enemy’s stubborn blood runs all too true to form.

 
+
 

In the false dawn of the day after al-Quds fell, you opened your eyes first. You got up from the place where you lay outside of the walls, surrounded by the dead of two armies, your only intention to leave this cursed place and your revenant enemy behind. As you did, you saw the badly hewn wooden cross attached to a leather thong looped round his wrist.

You slit his throat once more for good measure and took the cross. On a good day, you think you know why you did it. It was another sort of day the first time he caught you up, shoved his preposterous sword through your back and into your heart, and took back his cross.

He also took the dagger you’d once killed him with, leaving a single silver dirham on the ground in exchange. You got up from the ground with nothing in your head but blank, blinding white, and followed after.
 

+
 

You’ve lived little more than a score of years beyond a century, but you know this for the truth: there will always be another battlefield to die on.

This one is not yours. You do not present yourself to die alongside these men who are not yours to care for.

Not yours now. They may well be yours once an end is made and you may then give what aid you can as best you can to any who still live. Until then, you watch from some little way up into the stony hills comprising the western boundary.

You hear him come, making his way up to you through scrubby oaks and olives, but you don’t look away from the field spread out below you. You’ve been expecting him to appear for days. You left signs enough for a horde of franj, and you are a little put out it’s taken him this long.

‘You could not have managed to arrive yesterday, when your presence might have made some difference?’ you say when he does nothing more than stand silent at your shoulder.

He shifts his weight and you glance at him.

There is a trace of something that could be regret in his lack of expression. It’s fleeting, hard to define, but you have been picking apart his non-expressions for more than a century now; you know what to look for.

‘There are more patrols now,’ he says, butchering your language as is his wont even so many years after learning it. ‘I left the roads to avoid them.’

‘They are your people,’ you grumble. ‘What are they going to do to you that you cannot walk away from?’

He slants you a more than usually inscrutable look. ‘They are Normaund. I have no people.’

You raise your eyebrows. ‘Has your benighted peninsula fallen into the sea, then? Tell me it is so, that I may thank God for many more than his usual blessings.’

His mouth quirks. ‘We will go there after this. You may see for yourself.’

‘Only if you come back first,’ you retort. There’s a muted roar from below, and a horn, the call of retreat. You both watch as this day’s battle becomes a rout.

Behind you, your enemy stirs himself. ‘You should go. Devouring your own heart at every unplanned skirmish accomplishes nothing.’

You will not look at him. Pale eyes, pale skin stood beside you where you asked that he be. All the while, your brethren lie in dead heaps below.

Your eyes prick and fill, and you find that you will look at him after all. You will turn your head and let him look at you.

Let him see. He should see.

You spit your vitriol at him for want of a better target. ‘Are these the words of the Genovese knight or the invading Frank? Perhaps it is the former monk who condescends to speak to a heretic. Or is there no division among the three?’

‘I deserve all that you will throw in my face and more,’ he replies, ‘but you don’t. Do not let my sins afflict your soul. You did not cause me to be.’ He nods at the field. ‘You didn’t cause this to be.’

Again, you look down on the all but deserted battlefield. Soon there will be only the dead and the wounded who cannot be saved.

‘Did I not cause you to be, then?’ you say with some bitterness. ‘I killed you. I made you what you are.’

‘And I you,’ he returns. ‘Perhaps God sees it as a balance. Perhaps Satan raised me up out of malign intent, and so God raised you up in turn to do good where I could only do ill.’

There are a thousand birds trapped behind your ribs. They tear at your tender flesh with their beaks in their desperate need to escape the prison of your chest. One of their cries bursts from your throat, harsh as the screams from below.

‘Be silent.’ You slash the air with your hand. ‘Don’t speak to me of what you don’t and can’t understand. I don’t know why I believed you might be of use here, so go. Crawl back beneath whatever stone spat you out and leave me be.’

You regret the words the moment they have left your mouth. Well before you’ve seen the look in his eyes. But so it has always been with you. Quick to anger, quicker to regret.

You open your mouth to say... you do not know what.

Not an apology. It wouldn’t be right, not between you. But if not that, then what? There’s been nothing in the experience of any poet, however eloquent, that could begin to match the years of shared experience that lie between you and him.

The slide of his knife against your throat is almost welcome amidst your indecision. Its shape is known to you, is something like comfort. Like the shape and weight of the arm he uses to hold you close. He is heat and a man’s strength the equal of your own, a body to match yours stretched the length of your spine. Your skin prickles up into goose flesh beneath your clothes everywhere he presses against you. When he speaks, his lips brush the nape of your neck.

Beneath the shroud of your clothing, within the cloak of your own skin, you shudder.

‘I’ve left you something. I ask that you use it with kindness. When you feel that you can bear my presence again, come and find me,’ he says, and cuts your throat.
 

+
 

The world comes back slowly, as it so often does.

Above you, the night sky groans under the weight of infinite star fields crowned by a fat, blue-white moon.

You lean over onto the prop of your hands and expel a deal of blood and bile from your throat and stomach. Could not he have killed you in some way less retroactively revolting? For a taciturn man, he’s something of an overdramatised ass.

You wipe your mouth on the back of your hand, wipe your hand off on the ground, and examine your immediate surroundings. He brought you back to the place you made camp last night. By all indications, you were laid on your side atop your blankets with your cloak draped over you. You fling the cloak off and struggle to your feet, but a quick look round shows he is not here.

As well for him that he isn’t.

That ill bred son of a donkey carried you back here while you were still dead. Over his shoulder, no doubt, like a sack of grain, only to lay you out with as much care as he might a swooned maiden.

A soft sound from behind pulls you around.

Across from your encampment, a horse stamps a hobbled hoof.

She’s a pretty little jennet. Good conformation. Seems friendly. She whickers at your approach, dips her nose to nuzzle the open palm you offer her.

Dapple grey with a silver mane and tail braided with pale blue ribbons, she is the perfect mount for a wealthy woman. You look to be sure, and discover your surmise is correct: the saddle is constructed for a lady’s comfort. He stole an expensive horse, probably from a Frankish noblewoman, and he now expects you to ride it through what may as well be enemy territory.

Even it wasn’t, the roads are rife with amateur banditry. The only thing he’s not done is hang a literal target over your backside.

You decide that when you next see him you will instantly kill him. After that you will continue to kill him until you are too tired to kill him even once more. Then, in sha’Allah, you will kill him again anyway, because above all other things, his death is your desire.
 

+
 

You are set upon three times on your road south, by three different groups of brigands.

As you kill them, you repeat to yourself what has become a vow of sorts: ‘I have killed him often, I do kill him often, I will kill him often even unto eternity.’

A nearly spent arrow pierces your chest. You cut down the man before you, reach up and take hold of the arrow’s shaft. Ripping the head from your flesh is beyond painful, but you have reached that point where you are beyond pain, beyond fury; poisoned by your own battle-heightened senses.

There were six of them including the bowman. You have finished with the fifth and are turning to pursue the sixth when the sound of an arrow’s strike stops you.

The bowman falls, the arrow you heard struck through his throat.

‘Be aware,’ you say as you wait for your own arrow wound to finish closing, ‘I intend to make your death as painful as is possible.’

He drops from his perch up on the rocks, landing in a crouch in front of you before straightening up.

He has a pouch of bolts attached to one hip; his sword hilt rears up from behind his opposite shoulder. He wears the sword slung across his back, for a change, and it is different than you recall. In addition to a much broader hilt, overall it appears even more pointlessly massive than his last.

‘That is new,’ you flick your fingers at it. ‘Should I ask who is now missing a weapon, and perhaps their life as well?’

He looks amused, but says nothing.

You nod at the crossbow he holds. ‘I’ve not seen you use one before.’

He hefts it for your inspection. ‘Most of us learned. I was accounted passing good, once.’

‘You are not terrible now,’ you say as you turn the body of the dead bowman over with your foot. Taken as a whole, these bandits encompass a varied mix of countries and cultures. This particular face is pale beneath a heavy layer of dirt, with Frankish features. ‘Will your kindred never cease to plague these lands?’

You mean it to be rhetorical, an unanswerable dig at his origins, but he replies in earnest, ‘I think... in a way. It will cease, in a way, eventually. Salah ad-Din has taken back more cities than any in Outremer had thought possible. If nothing else, content yourself that he’s the beginning of their end.’

‘Their,’ you repeat. ‘You don’t count yourself among them.’

He meets your eyes, unflinching. You look away before he does.

‘Are you following me?’ you demand. ‘Does it amuse you to watch me kill and die in order to prevent the theft of the expensive horseflesh you stole and then dropped unasked for and unwanted on my head?’

‘You said I owed you a horse. You do not recall?’

(Once, you believed him humourless. You were mistaken, and well do you repent your mistake. His sense of humour is as horrific as you might have anticipated had you been less wilfully ignorant and more observant.)

You muffle your groan into your hands. ‘I said, I said. Forty years past, I said, and it was three horses and a camel! Since when have you listened?’

‘Yours has been the one voice I trust these many years,’ he says in his placid way. ‘You are the most just man I know. When I think to act, I often ask myself. Would he accomplish his aim in this manner? Yes? I follow through. No?’ He shrugs. ‘I find another way.’

Something clicks inside of your head. You hear it in your ears and within your mind, and then there is a grey film over your eyes, clouding everything but him.

‘I didn’t follow you,’ he goes on, heedless of having disabled your brain. ‘I am for Jerusalem and then the coast, but these men have raided the villages and farms that lie within reach of a day’s riding in all directions. I thought... killing is what I’m for. It’s something I can do for these people, at least. To rid them of one fear among many.’

You stare at him. He stares back. There is the dull pock of an arrow striking deep into flesh, and he staggers forward into your arms.

You stagger as well before getting a better grip on him, pulling him past the tree line into the lee of the outcrop.

‘Unwashed offspring of a disease-ridden dog,’ you mutter, dropping down to the ground with him as soon as you are out of bowshot. ‘I’d thought them dead?’

‘Three others,’ he pants. ‘At... camp. Meant to... kill. After.’

‘After you dealt with the ambush,’ you finish for him. ‘Well, they are here now, in some number.’ You balance on the balls of your feet, still crouched next to him. ‘I will deal with them,’ you tell him, ‘and then I will deal with you.’

‘Know... you will.’ His smile is bloody. His breathing is shallow and growing shallower with every breath he takes. The arrow must be lodged in his lung.

‘I will have to push it down and through,’ you warn him. ‘It will be the better for you if you are dead when I do.’

His eyes have closed, but the red-stained corners of his mouth twitch. ‘So... strange. This life... of. Ours.’

‘Aywa. You may have half of a brain after all.’ You push to your feet and stand for a moment looking down at him. ‘Try to be dead when I return.’

‘Not... problem,’ he gasps, coughs, and goes limp, unconscious.

You take up his crossbow and bolts — not your preference, but serviceable under the circumstances — and you leave to hunt down his killer.
 

+
 

He is as you told him to be, slumped over on his side. Blood has pooled on the ground under his head; as well, it’s all down his chin and his front from where he must have coughed it up when drowning in it. His eyes are half open, filmed over.

You ignore your own healing wounds, got in battle with a trio of incompetent bandits who could not run very fast, and you break the fletching off the arrow intruded deep into his back. Once it’s gone, you slit his tunic and shift open around the shaft and ruck them up to his armpits, the better to see what you are dealing with. Any way you examine it, the angle is a bad one.

‘It’s very well that you’re dead,’ you tell him. You grasp the broken end of the shaft and begin to push it out of him.

He comes back just as the pointed tip pierces the skin of his diaphragm. His eyelids flutter, then snap wide. He sucks in a breath that’s half gasp, half pained moan, and flails out with his arms. It’s an expected reaction, but if he doesn’t stop, this is going to get much worse than it already is, quickly.

‘Be still,’ you say in the voice you once used with your company, and also on other commanders’ especially idiotic seconds. You guide one of his hands to your thigh, tightening the muscle to give him some resistance to fight back against.

‘It’s nearly out,’ you tell him. ‘Be as still as you can. Better yet, be unconscious.’

For a wonder, in the next moment he is, his hand slackening its grip on your leg. He who is most Merciful of all must have decided to grant His mercy even unto one of His lapsed faithful today.

You push the arrow the rest of the way through as quickly as you dare, and you watch him heal for the first time since the day you met him.

During the first year of your undeath, you spent some time cutting yourself just to watch your flesh join itself back together. You never had time to watch when your enemy was with you, and besides him, you were the only specimen available for your investigations. So you cut yourself to pieces and wrote down your observations in methodical prose that would have surprised several of your interrogators at university.

What struck you most was that the more often you were wounded, the faster you healed. Counterintuitive, but true nonetheless.

In this, as he is in so many other things, he is your match. With the foreign object removed from his body, his epidermis knits itself in a matter of moments. You imagine he is still healing internally, and will be for a while, but the skin covering his diaphragm is now as flawless as it was before you pushed the arrow through it.

You don’t realise you’ve laid your hand on him there, where he was damaged but isn’t anymore, until he opens his eyes. He stares at you, unseeing, then he rolls over onto his belly and vomits up the remains of his death.

Your hand falls away from him. You rise and retrieve the water skin from his horse, found and brought back along with your own horse after you killed the last of the bowmen.

He’s sitting up when you return. When you hand him the skin he thanks you in your own tongue in his cracked voice, then rinses his mouth before drinking deeply.

‘Enough,’ you say, ‘or it will come back up.’

He nods, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Blood loss. Even though it comes back, my mouth feels like a desert afterwards.’ He corks the skin and holds it out, swaying slightly.

‘It’s your own,’ you say without taking it. ‘We should go. The bodies will draw predators on both four legs and two, soon enough.’

He hefts the skin in one hand. With the other, and without hesitation, he takes the hand you offer him, lets you pull him to his feet and follows you back to the horses.

You look your jennet over and stroke her nose. She seems no worse for her brief sojourn among the idiots. She nudges you, looking for something to eat that isn’t heat-wizened scrub, probably. You laugh and pat her neck.

‘Not for another day, my love. Then you shall have what you seek.’

Behind you, gritty dirt scuffs under shod feet. ‘Yusuf?’ says your enemy.

It startles you enough that you jerk round to stare at him. You don’t call each other by name, either of you. You never offered yours to him, though he’s heard you give it to others. In the same way, you know his name, though you’ve never spoken it aloud to him.

He’s much closer than he was. From across this short distance, he looks terrible. Covered in his own dried blood, and exhausted.

‘If you are looking for someone to carry you to your horse and put you on it, look elsewhere,’ you say.

‘No, I-’ He shakes his head. Swallows, his throat bobbing. He puts out a hand towards you.

You still your automatic flinch. His fingertips graze your jawline.

‘Yusuf,’ he says again, the sound of your name misshapen, unaccustomed on his tongue. ‘I would wish... may I?’

You could not have predicted this. Or perhaps you could. If you were not just as mule-stubborn as he is.

‘You are still stupidly tall. It’s inconvenient,’ you complain. You move into him, into the touch of his hand on your face, and you allow him his moment of shock. You put your own hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to you.

 
+
 

A few less than a hundred years into the future, on an intelligence gathering mission that is just the two of you, at Noriko’s prompting you’ll tell her about the first time you fucked him.

‘A travesty,’ you will say. ‘I can’t even blame it on inexperience.’

‘No?’ she replies, eyebrows risen.

You smile, though there is little enough for either of you to smile over of late. ‘I had one hundred and twenty-four summers, he only a few less. Both of us had chosen to take our chances in battle over relatively safe lives lived amidst lies.’

Her hair rustles against her tunic when she inclines her head. Few understand better than Noriko does what it is to reject a path dictated by sex and gender as determined at birth.

‘You’ve not spoken of this before,’ she remarks.

‘No point tearing open an old scar. We both knew we preferred men years before we died the first time. If either of us didn’t know what to do with another man’s cock by that point in our lives, it would’ve been farce, not travesty.’

‘Not inexperience,’ she says, her voice uneven with badly hidden laughter.

‘Just terrible sex,’ you agree.

‘Oh, just,’ she manages, and then she’s giggling, shaking with relief and fatigue and hunger. Dusty and bedraggled from a sprint through unfamiliar streets, she’s far too cheerful for a woman who has little choice but to remain leant up against your shoulder on the not very clean floor of a storeroom belonging to a former al-Andalus merchant. He is sympathetic to the plight of the Muslim dispossessed, and in hopes of giving aid without putting himself into direct conflict with Aragon and Castile, has allowed the use of the Catalunyan property on which you’ve been hiding for nearly a week now.

Noriko doesn’t trust him, but she’s willing to use him as he so obviously wishes to use both of you, so long as you keep her amused in the meantime. You’re willing enough to follow her lead. She knows the situation better than you, and besides. Noriko bored is a dangerous proposition, as she now proves.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she says when you make no effort to take your tale any further. ‘You can’t leave it there. Tell me the rest.’

‘Little wonder you and Andromache are so well matched. You have no patience, either of you.’

She stifles more giggles into your shoulder. You smother your own laughter in the fall of her hair. She tucks her arm around your waist, you curl yours round her shoulders, and you sit together and take comfort from the sound of each other’s continued breathing.

‘I jest,’ you say into her hair, ‘but I don’t really remember. His mouth tasted like something had died in it a week past, I recall that. We were both filthy with our own and other people’s blood and entrails. I still hated him more often than I didn’t. I shoved an arrow out of him, he asked to kiss me... I kissed him, instead. And then I was coming in his hand, even as he came in mine.’

She hums deep in her throat, something between acknowledgement and recognition. ‘Like Andromache’s blackout drinking, almost.’

You choke on a laugh. ‘Exactly like. I knew something had happened in between, but-’

‘You didn’t want to know,’ she finishes.

‘It happened again three days later, which I recall too well, but I can’t tell you if it was good or not the first time. For all I know, it was perfection.’

She hums again, this time in disbelief. ‘Really wouldn’t count on it. If I had a gold dinar for every stupid or just plain bad sex story I have involving Andromache, I’d buy Okinawa in total and spend the rest of my eternity keeping the peace in and the mainlands out. I could tell you-’

‘’Riko, cherished friend of my eternity, beloved sister of my heart. On my knees, I beg that you will not.’

She snorts a laugh and digs her elbow into your side. You retaliate, and from there diplomatic relations between opposing sides decline rapidly. Story time is over for the night.

Two days later you will be caught, and she will have to retrieve you. But that will be another story altogether.

 
+
 

‘If you wish to kill me, I won’t fight you,’ he offers.

You don’t bother to look at him. ‘What would be the point? I would have to do it again soon after. Keep your Christian martyrdom to yourself, I want no part in it.’

A wheezing, snorting noise comes from his direction. When it comes again, you look.

The idiot is laughing. Bent over in his saddle, clutching his reins and his stomach at once. Laugh-snorting like a swine.

‘I know I’ve not been as faithful as I should these many years, most Merciful Lord,’ you say, ‘but I must ask. What great wrong have I committed? What terrible crime have I perpetrated against humanity to have deserved this as a consequence?’

You wave a hand at your companion, who laughs harder.

‘I mean,’ you add, ‘I can see why You would visit me on him-’

He makes a sound like something being strangled. You know it well, having strangled him yourself. More than once.

He’s eminently strangleable.

‘...he being entirely deserving of affliction,’ you go on, ‘but on the whole I feel I am blameless in this matter. Mostly. Mostly blameless. Except perhaps for the time with the cobras and the mongoose. Or the time I pushed that truly tasteless carving over onto him and then threw all of his spare clothes and armour into the river while he was still dead. Possibly even the time when-’

‘Enough,’ he gasps. ‘Yusuf, enough! Stop, please. Please,’ he says again when you open your mouth.

‘Have it your own way,’ you say. You rein your horse away from the path you’ve been picking between widely spaced trees. He calls your name, but you hear him following so you don’t trouble yourself to answer.

In a clearing of oaks sparse with determined grasses, you bring your jennet to a halt and slide from her back. He reins his own gelding in a moment later, peering down at you in confusion.

‘What is-’

‘Come down,’ you interrupt. He does as you tell him without demanding an explanation. This is how much he trusts you.

It’s terrifying.

Sick fear tightens your chest and your throat. You ignore it and advance on him. This has to end, one way or another. You can’t bear to spend even one more day wading through a morass of your own uncertainty on top of his tentative overtures.

You put a hand to his chest and push until his back is against an oak trunk. He slouches into it, hunching his shoulders. Making himself more accessible to you. He doesn’t even try to resist, idiot that he is.

‘Will you now allow me to cut your throat?’ you ask.

‘I — if you need to? Yes?’ He’s staring at your mouth. His own parts slightly. He licks his lips, a quick flick of tongue over skin that leaves them slick, glistening. You remember how they looked sixty-three years ago in a desert, dried and cracked from sand and heat and unforgiving sun.

They are unmarred now, if as red as they were then. They open beneath the press of your own lips.

You bite down. Not gently. Not hard. Not enough to taste blood; just enough to taste him. He makes a choked, back of the throat noise and goes boneless in your grip. He brings his hands up to cup your face and lets you kiss him. He kisses you back with nothing less than enthusiasm.

It’s as good as it was a day ago, and three days before that. No, it’s better. This time you have no incessant desire to gut him intruding on your desire to fuck his mouth with your tongue, which is almost enough in itself to drive you to homicide.

‘Unfortunately,’ you say against his lips, ‘I am this stupid. There is an inn along this route?’

‘Two,’ he says. His voice cracks. He clears his throat before continuing. ‘A caravanserai perhaps three leagues from here, and the inn at the next town. It is... a fairly large town. The accommodations are not terrible.’

‘Good,’ you say. You shove away from him and walk back to your horse.

‘Yusuf,’ he says from behind you, still on that dazed note. ‘What-’

‘An inn,’ you say as you pull yourself into your saddle. ‘Choose one.’

You look down at him, standing where you left him.

He looks well used, his hair and clothes put askew by your hands. His mouth is ripe as a summer plum, bruised by the pressure of your own mouth, which feels as used as his looks. His confusion is palpable.

‘Choose,’ you say again with a grim sort of satisfaction. ‘Or I will. If I’m going to self immolate, I may as well be comfortable while I get on with it.’

 
+
 

The mattress creaks under your combined weight, because of course it does. No doubt the entire inn can hear it, or would if whoever is in the next room over wasn’t doing the same with much more accompanying noise.

‘Whose very stupid idea was this,’ you pant against his shoulder.

‘Yours,’ he says with the surety of a man who has two fingers shoved knuckle-deep into your hole. He twists them, changes the angle and presses in just so.

You groan and rest your forehead on his collar bone. ‘This from you, who decided the best jape of all would be to gift me a noblewoman’s stolen mount.’

You feel his smile against your neck. ‘Giacinta isn’t stolen. Only borrowed.’

‘Who would be so want-witted as to lend you anything, much less a horse like that one?’

‘The lady Isabella,’ he says, and presses in again.

Sensation that is not quite pain, not quite pleasure pulls a grunt out of you. It pushes you back up to sitting just to get more of it, more of him. You will your breathing to a steady pace, but you grip him tight at hip and shoulder, knees and hands.

He can’t possibly mistake this for anything other than what it is.

He doesn’t. He touches you, he stares up at you where you straddle him, and he smiles, his ghost eyes made luminous by candlelight. You shut your own eyes so you can’t see any more of him; looking will only make you think and possibly do things even more stupid than those you have already thought and done.

‘If Isabella is who I believe her to be, you are more idiotic than I’d thought possible,’ you tell him. ‘And I have no illusions as to your idiocy.’

‘I could... I could take you to see her?’ he suggests. He sounds distracted, the only excuse for such an offer as that. He moves his fingers again, you open your eyes along with your mouth when you draw a sharp breath, and then he is not the only one suffering from distraction or idiocy. He gives you the cup of his free hand to thrust your cock into and you lose the thread of your thoughts as well as most of your reason.

His fingers move slow, so slowly inside of you. The drag of them is all but unbearable. The only thing more unbearable would be if they were gone. He lets go of your cock, and you’d protest, but he’s already urging you towards him, nudging you up to straddle his chest and present your cock to his gaze, even as his fingers move slow, slow, slow inside.

He handles you with care. Cups and lifts your balls, then wraps his hand round your cock. His thumb slides up and down below the head, then around and around the band of skin just below it. You prop yourself up with your arms extended behind you and your hands braced against his hips, and you watch him. ‘Not what you were expecting?’

He is frowning, but his expression clears when he looks back up at you. ‘No. Yes. The difference is little, and I have seen the like before.’

His thumb circles your glans and you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep the sound your body wants you to make behind your teeth.

He’s frowning again. ‘He was... a Jew? I think. It was not... there was only the one night.’

‘Possibly he was. What did he think of you, I wonder? Was he surprised to learn that there is not much difference? Or was he like myself, and already knew?’ You slide one of your hands inward from his hip, searching-

He groans deep in his throat and his hand tightens around your cock, dragging an answering gasp from you. It’s gratifying to watch him writhe beneath you, no trace of the stoic left.

You trace the shape of him with as much care as he did for you. He matches you in this as well: same basic length and size and shape. For the other, he is like any other man who is uncut.

‘There is a bit more give when you’re hard, perhaps,’ you mutter, tightening your grip and wringing more sounds from his throat. ‘Not so much, though.’

His fingers, which had gone still inside of you, begin to move again, slower than before. You grab his wrist with your free hand, stopping him.

‘If you do not want to die with my blade in your throat, you will take these out of me,’ you tug at his wrist, ‘and put this in instead.’ You stroke his cock just hard enough that his mouth parts on a strangled whine. He’s still looking up at you, but his eyes have lost their focus.

‘Or,’ you say, ‘would you rather I fuck you?’

He trembles beneath you, but he shakes his head, stubborn to the last. ‘I want-’

He pulls you in with his hands on you and in you. His eyes track yours. ‘Come in my mouth first. I’ll fuck you however you like, Yusuf. Or you me, but please, I want to see-’

The people in the next room have finished with one another. In the quiet left behind, the sound of him pulling his oil-slick fingers from your body is loud. Filthy.

You tip yourself off of him and splay yourself out across the bed on your back, and he makes a sound like a man struck through — a sound you heard only days ago, that you’ve heard from him countless times before, though never under these circumstances.

You cross your arms behind your head and grin at him, you say, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind now, idiot franj,’ and something moves behind his eyes. A ripple of some emotion you don’t recognise. Then he’s over you, shouldering your thighs up and back to accommodate himself. Bending to take you into his mouth.

He’s done this before. Many times, if you are any judge, and you are.

His mouth is slick, perfect suction around your cock. His tongue knows it’s business. He’s better at this than even Manoj, who hailed from somewhere east of Delhi and was nearly as good with a bow as is your enemy. He could do things with his tongue, Manoj, which if not illegal in most parts of the world these days must certainly be considered taboo. And yet, even he couldn’t drag you straight to the edge and then keep you there the way your enemy has done.

Your balls draw up; they’re an insistent pressure you can’t ignore, but you aren’t going to come just now. You won’t give him that satisfaction, not yet, not yet. You set yourself to endure, eyes and teeth clenched shut against the need for orgasm, hands gripping anything but him-

It stops as suddenly as it began. A low noise escapes your throat without your leave. Your eyes snap open of their own accord.

He’s watching you, his cheek pressed against your inner thigh. His mouth is red and wet and swollen; it feels like a personal failing to look upon the glisten of combined saliva and your own slickness on his lips.

‘Yusuf,’ he says, and... nothing.

Nothing at all.

‘Well?’ you say. Demand. You are so hard it hurts, and not only your aching prick and balls. Your entire body feels like a bell that has been struck, only to be peremptorily muffled.

He wraps forefinger and thumb tight around the base of your cock, constricting, choking a wordless protest out of you. Other fingers toy with your rim, rubbing and pressing without entering. Making you jerk and tighten everywhere. You make another token sound of protest, but still you don’t move to stop him. You do nothing to make him begin.

His cheek chafes the skin of your inner thigh, stubble rough when he turns his head. He rubs again, squeezes again, and still he watches. Watches you try and fail not to react to what he is doing to you.

‘You know my name as I know yours, Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Kaysani. I wish to hear you say it,’ he says, and swallows you back down even as his fingers press in to fuck the last remnants of coherence from you.

It punches out of you, surprised. Involuntary. ‘Nicolò.’

You curl yourself in, tightening yourself around him everywhere. His skin whitens further beneath your too-firm grip, but the bruises have no chance to bloom; they heal instantly under your clenched fingers as you come down his throat, helpless with it, unable to do anything but give him what he’s asked for.

‘Nicolò.’

He slides his fingers out of you. Slides up between your legs and pushes inside of you. The girth of him stretches you wide and slow, always on the verge of pain but never quite passing the threshold. It’s so incremental he’s all the way in with your cock in his hand before you realise you’re halfway to hard again.

He says your name. Kisses it into your skin while he fucks you, until you forget why it matters what he calls you or that he calls you anything at all. Until you spill your seed over his fingers and his name into the air with the same careless insistence.

When he comes, he comes inside of you, your name hushed, quiet in his mouth. Slicked over his lips and up in between your thighs. Sighed warm and fleeting against your throat.
 

+

 
You come awake with your face mashed against his shoulder blade, your arm thrown over his waist. There’s a faint echo of a familiar, satisfying ache in your thighs and lower back, and a terrible crook in your neck.

When you lean back, you find that there is enough light in the room for you to see. Just enough to trace the clean lines of bone and muscle beneath pale skin dotted in clusters, with only the occasional planetary mole to interrupt starfields of freckles. The breadth of his shoulders is a wall between you and the door. He positioned himself with deliberation.

‘Yusuf?’ he says, sleep-slurred, and tries to turn over.

‘It’s not full light yet. Go back to sleep,’ you tell him, holding him in place.

‘Mmh,’ he says, and stills, subsiding back into unconsciousness. You lay your cheek back down close to where it was when you woke, and do the same.

You can always kill each other in the morning if the mood strikes.
 

+


It’s he who wakes you a second time when he touches you.

His hand is closed around the wrist of the arm you’ve draped over him. His thumb strokes your skin, an incomprehensible pattern of noughts and crosses you’ve no intention of unraveling.

You yawn against his shoulder blade. Scrape your beard over his nape. He laughs even as he shudders, sharing the shiver of his skin with you. He nudges backwards into you, rubbing his arse against your stiff cock.

‘Oh?’ you say. You pull your wrist free to reach down between his legs. He’s as hard as you are. His cock fills your hand, smears pre-cum across your fingers. You stroke him once, and again; slide your hand down to cup his balls, rolling them gently within their sac.

‘Yes,’ he gasps, and parts his thighs enough for you to slide your cock in between them.

You dig for the vial of oil, find it shoved beneath the single, tattered cushion the bed boasts. Your cock slides dry against the tender insides of his thighs, nudges his balls every time you move. He makes a shocked sound. His muscles clamp down even as you spill oil between your bodies, slicking the slide of skin on skin to something easy.

Nothing about the two of you together has ever been easy. Nothing but this, now, he. Closer to you in this moment than anyone else has managed.

It’s unfair of you, but you ask it anyway. ‘Why?’

His breath hitches. He chokes on words, on air, ‘I don’t... I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t. Yusuf, I-’

‘Quiet. Unless you want to be heard,’ you say. Unfair again, but he doesn’t seem to care or even to notice.

He whimpers and grinds back against you. Begs with his body rather than his words. Your cock throbs, insistent, trapped between the flex of his thighs, and you are in no mood to tease. You take his cock back into your hand and shove your prick deeper into the slick, gripping heat between his legs.

He’s louder this morning than he was last night. Sound spills from his mouth at a rate that arouses and annoys at once. You clamp your free hand over his mouth, hiss a warning into his ear, ‘Be still, if you do not want everyone within a league of this place to know what we are doing.’

His fingers close round your wrist. He forces your hand away, inexorable, his panting breaths damp against your palm even as he shoves back into the thrust of your hips.

‘Let them hear,’ he snarls, the most furious you’ve ever heard him. ‘I want them to,’ he says, and his voice catches, tips over into a shattered cry when you tighten your grip round his cock and strip him, ruthless strokes that have a single purpose: to bring him off.

‘Is it all you wanted?’ you goad. ‘Shall I make you cry out again?’

‘Bastard,’ he gasps. ‘Just make me come.’

‘I will,’ you tell him.

You do.

 
+
 

Late morning sun slants in through the mashrabiya, one hundred darts of light like coarse grains of sand spilt careless across the tiled floor.

He cleanses himself at the basin before pulling his hosen up, tying them to the drawstring of his braies. His fingers move with a delicacy one wouldn’t expect of such a tall, unwieldy-looking man.

You know better, of course, now more than ever before. Your body is an all over pleasurable ache, the result of his dexterity.

The marks you left on him have gone. The skin of his chest and back is first flawless under its sunlit dusting, then vanished beneath shift and tunic. Belt and pouch are fastened into place.

‘Take care you do not catch any more arrows,’ you say without bothering to rise. ‘I doubt anyone else will take the trouble to push them out for you.’

He slings his sheathed sword over his shoulder and turns to look at you. A faint line bisects his forehead; he fiddles with the buckle of the baldric. ‘You could come with me,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t then have to worry about any arrows but yours.’

‘Even so,’ you murmur. ‘I’d likely rid you of those as well. Eventually.’

He snorts when he laughs. It should not be charming, and it isn’t. He isn’t. Not in the least.

‘Weren’t you leaving?’ you say.

‘Only for food. I will come back,’ he tells you. ‘Have I not always?’

‘Did I ask?’ you reply.

He pauses, his hand on the door, and looks back at you. ‘You always do,’ he says, ‘one way or another.’

The door closes behind him before you can begin to think of a response.
 

+
 

Of course he comes back.

He’s never not come back. That’s a good half of the problem.

The other half being that you always come back as well.


+
 

Down the centuries, the shape of shaped, edged steel changes, as does the preferred choice of weapons in general. The first time he dies with a musket ball in his chest, you slaughter close to a quarter of a battlefield in order to make certain the death of the one who pulled the trigger.

You are still the only one who is allowed to kill him, and he you. Andromache and Noriko learnt that quickly, but the rest of the world is not so clever as they, and tends not to understand any but the most obvious of hints, often the forceful application of a large, blunt instrument to the cranium.

Humanity as a whole may evolve, but as individuals, humans continue to be human.

Soldiering changes its skin with every advance, but wears the same colours it always has done beneath crusted layers of dirt and gun powder and bodily fluids. Blood lust remains as well, though it goes disguised; in these latter days it all too often masquerades as racial superiority plastered over with a fine veneer of patriotism, which sadly is nothing new.

These so-called enlightened men with their thin steel and the pride they take in their steady pistol hands; these cretini who consider the rigid code duello honour’s zenith... what do they understand of the unending strife and human misery civilisation stands upon, has been built on, stone by blood-stained stone?
There is less honour in the whole of this sort of culture than there is in one death-dealing sweep of Andromache’s axe.

Still, you alter the outsides of yourselves to fit, you and your beloved enemy. Your bodies are malleable substance in the shapes of men; you remake those shapes according to the demands of the age.

Your minds and souls are otherwise: ancient by your own lights if not by Andromache’s, metal lines and angles honed to razor edges by one another’s thoughts and hands. You are each the weapon the other wields, and you at least will never have a better.

‘You think so?’ he says as he hands you the rapier it is comme il faut to wear in these ill-conceived times. ‘You didn’t always.’

‘I did not always do this, either,’ you say, and then you take his face in your hands and and pull him down to work his mouth open with your mouth, to do with it as you would both please. A slow, uncompromising kiss when he is nearly late to an engagement you’ve no desire that he attend is its own reward.

‘Yusuf,’ he sighs your name against your lips. ‘I gave my word.’

You kiss him once more, then you let him go and go yourself to lean against the bed. ‘What do I know of words given or not? I am only a poor ignorant heathen lost amidst your superior Frankish crowd,’ you say with a grin and, it must be said, deliberate provocation.

He looks as though he’s just sucked a lemon. ‘This is Venisia. They are not Frankish, much less any of mine, as you know. Do not think I won’t hold you to your promise that we will leave once Andromache arrives. And don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do,’ he adds as he settles his own sword belt round his distracting hips. ‘Misdirecting me with points you know will anger me.’

‘You cannot blame me for the attempt,’ you say as you watch him twitch his cuffs into something approaching order with practised flicks of his wrists. ‘You are both terrible and beautiful to look on when you are angry, and well worth the effort either way.’

He glances at you sidelong. ‘I’m not going to kill you tonight, so you may as well stop your games. I am his second. I mean to prevent this if I can.’

His facile irritation falls away, leaving exhaustion in its wake. He rubs at his reddened eyes, further darkening the half moons of bruised skin that sit beneath them.

You go back over to him and put a hand to his cheek. His smile is as strained as the rest of him; the suggestion of it on his lips stirs an ache deep within your chest.

‘I know better than to think I can turn you from your path,’ you tell him. ‘You are maddeningly wrong-headed at times. I will meet you on the road later.’

‘I suppose,’ he says as he follows you out of your shared rooms, clattering after you down the stairs and into the building’s narrow corridors, ‘that you will now go to Faraj’s shop, to drink his coffee and smoke from his šīšah until neither of you can think sense, much less quote poetry at one another.’

You shrug as you push open the side door. The brine and river-silt smell of the canals washes in to fill the cramped stairwell. You stand aside to let one of your upstairs neighbours go by, returning their murmured greeting before you answer him.

‘One must do something to pass the time while one’s idiot beloved is away on a fool’s errand. Faraj was good enough to let this flat to two strange men he knew nothing of.’ You wave a hand at the canal-side building you’ve just exited. ‘Why should I not spend an evening here and there providing amusement for a kind, aging gentleman?’

Nicolò falls into step beside you, dodging two traditionally garbed Yehudim so intent on their conversation they don’t notice the pair of you, and a long-suffering hijabi woman with a whining boy child in tow. Nicolò watches the woman and child go with a faint smile, before turning his gaze back to you: he looks very unimpressed.

He says, ‘You forget to whom you are speaking. Faraj is a cunning old fox, and a bad influence. He plies you with that devil’s weed, scolds you for the haram content of your sketchbook, then compliments your latest ghazal until you are ripe for whatever mischief he cares to drag you into. As for you, Yusuf al-Tayyib,’ he continues with an even more forbidding look than the last, ‘I’m sure your wide eyes once convinced every one of your unsuspecting relatives of your youthful innocence, but I met you in battle. I received the life sized portrait, whereas they must have lived to mourn the memory of a cameo, and died in blissful ignorance.’

By the time he finishes you’re laughing so hard you’ve stopped walking.

It’s not late — the sun is not yet down — though neither is it early. The Cannaregio enclave you’ve come from sits adjacent to the ghetto, comprised mostly of lower income residences. The people moving about the streets are going home, or about their personal business, and not paying either of you any mind. You are free to lean yourself against Ponte della Guglie’s balustrade and laugh as long as you like.

‘Oh, Nicolò, Nicolò. How is it possible that you are such a wonder? The moon risen in my night sky to light my way, the sun that guides me unerring along the road of my days. How I love you,’ you say in zeneize, and you drop your head back and laugh until your stomach aches.

He stands unmoving not far away, his eyes widened to pale, unearthly pools. He opens his mouth, then closes it. He turns and begins to walk away, then he turns round again and comes back. He does this three times before he comes to stand before you, hands dangling limp and open at his sides.

You hold one of your own hands out to him. ‘Please come here to me?’

His fingers don’t tremble in your hold; the quake of him is trapped within the flicker of his eyes. You tug him gently towards you and he goes with the pull, only to balk at the last moment.

‘Yusuf,’ he says, and shuts his eyes, standing rigid within the loose cup of your arms. He draws a shuddering breath, says, ‘I am sorry. I’m sorry, Yusuf, I... can’t. Not-’

‘Nicolò,’ you say, and he subsides. He opens his eyes and looks at you. They are bright and dull at once, his ghost eyes. Full to overflow with all the things he cannot say. You answer aloud since he will not ask with his tongue. ‘It doesn’t matter. Speak when you can, be silent if you must.’

In the fading light of a quiet Venesia evening, you brush your fingertips down the bridge of his sheer cliff of a nose. Press a kiss to each of his cheeks, and then the centre point between his harassed eyebrows as well.

‘You are late,’ you say, ‘and I have made you so. Go. I’ve said that I will come out to meet you outside Mestre. I still mean to.’

He pulls you against him with a back of the throat noise that is more breath than sound, then he pulls himself out of your arms and all but runs away.

 
+
 

Near the agreed-on mark, you encounter a scene of violence, perpetrated by roadside thieves at the most superficial first glance. The quality of the attackers’ clothing and weapons, though, makes an unlikely premise of their guise as seeming bandits. More probably they are friends of Nicolò’s friend’s opponent got up to look as highwaymen, and then come to ambush the victor of the duel, as so often happens after one of these supposedly honourable affairs.

Nicolò is dead, shot in the back and fallen from his horse, his friend beside him in much the same condition. The difference is, Nicolò will soon open his eyes and get to his feet. The boy will not.

You carry two pistols and a sword. You leave your horse cropping grass on the verge, and you kill three of them before they fully realise you are there. By that time Nicolò has risen to his feet and drawn his own sword.

He spits something at the three false brigands remaining, some colloquial Veneto insult you’ve not heard before, and don’t know the meaning of. Whatever its meaning, it jars them from the terrified stupor the rise of a dead man reduced them to, and propels them towards him.

He cuts them down. The ruthless precision that is Nicolò with a sword of any crafting in his hands allows for nothing less. He is beautiful, efficient brutality; he wastes no motion. Each of his actions has a purpose, so that when finally he goes still, so too does everything around him.

The air stinks of gun powder and blood and bodily waste. The mingled scent-taste sits at the back of your throat, cloying and acrid at once. You spit tainted saliva out rather than swallow it, and you stand off to one side of where he is knelt down at his dead friend’s side.

It is all so pointless.

At least at al-Quds there was an obvious divide. A clear line drawn between those attacking without provocation, and those defending against the attackers. Here there are only confused human beings killing one another for no better reason than that their pride has been wounded, or that they perceive that it has been, or that the reputation of someone they care for has been harmed in some way or other.

There are no victors in war, not truly, and there are no victors on this stretch of abandoned, moonlit road.

There is only death and its careless, residual casualties.

And there is Nicolò. Dead but risen. A casualty in his own right, on his knees beside the body of his friend, bowed into himself. He holds himself stiffly, his face as blank as it is wet. Silent in grief and anger alike.
 

+
 

‘He didn’t kill him,’ he says. He lies too still even for him, his back pressed tight to your chest. He is burrowed into you as far as he can manage, his head tucked under your chin.

‘It is as I believed, then.’ You rest your cheek against the top of his head. ‘Your doing?’

‘No. Giacomo only wanted to make his point, and have it accepted. He had no desire to kill a youth who was just as heedless as he had often felt himself to be. Because of his mercy, because of an idiot boy’s resentment and scorning of that mercy, he is dead. And that is my doing for filling his head with my conciliatory nonsense.’

Your shoulder is becoming damp where his face rests on it.

‘I won’t say you are giving yourself too much credit,’ you say. ‘Though I may allow myself to think as much. I will remind you that your own actions are the only actions you control. To take responsibility for others’ actions is arrogance, which is an affront to God.’

He chokes on a laugh which is more of a sob. ‘You must offend Him on a daily basis, then,’ he manages.

You bury your inappropriate laughter in his hair.

‘I am so tired, Yusuf,’ he says, low enough so as to be nearly inaudible. ‘Tired of death, tired of waste. I don’t think humanity understands anything but death and waste.’

‘I suppose,’ you say after a moment, ‘that I will have to concede your point. After all, you did stab me nearly to death last week, and ruined my best waistcoat into the bargain. Which is a great waste of a beautiful garment, especially as it was my favourite, and a still greater waste of unflawed silk. So you see-’

He is giggling into your arm: that helpless, hitching laugh he gives when he doesn’t want to be amused, but can’t help himself, because you are endlessly and effortlessly amusing whether he likes it or not.

He moves of sudden, turning in your arms and taking you with him. Rolling you to your back so that he is laid the length of you, settled in between your legs where you’ve parted them to make room for him.

Tremors of laughter run through him and into you; his eyes are red and swollen, his cheeks and fringe damp. He is a mess and he is lovely; he is all that he is and was and shall be, and more than.

‘I love you,’ he says in zeneize, blunt as always, whatever it costs him.

You reach up to push his hair back from his face. He makes a sound deep in his throat, leans into the scritch of your fingers. You do it again.

‘I did not say it to force the like from you,’ you tell him. ‘If you are uncomfortable with-’

He shakes his head, causing the fine, red-gold strands to slide through your fingers. ‘I can say it now. I couldn’t then.’

‘Mmhm.’

‘We were outside!’ he insists. ‘You get away with extravagance of emotion in public because it appears natural to you. People take it as you being naturally histrionic. Or perhaps just a travelling player.’

You poke him in the ribs. He rewards you with one of his minimalist, corner-of-the-mouth smiles.

‘You know what I mean,’ he says. ‘I don’t have the same luxury of expression. If I’d ever tried,’ he adds wryly, ‘we’d’ve been at best imprisoned for sodomy in at least twenty countries by now.’

You grin at him. ‘To have seen and heard you so express yourself might have been worth it. We are both tributaries of the same great sea. Do you deny it? How many times have you expounded on a given cook’s failures when the pasta is not al dente?’

He snorts. ‘You always agree with me. And it might be worth it to you, but not so much anyone else.’

‘You only say that because you pay no mind to anything but the crime committed against your precious cuisine. If you had, you’d know you’ve entertained more than a few diners over the years.’

He’s beautiful when he smiles, even more so when laughter catches him unawares. The tug in your chest always manages to catch you equally unawares, pulling you along on the rising tide of his mirth.

‘Don’t know... why I still subject myself to you,’ he gasps out. ‘Your sense of humour is terrible. “You owe me a camel.”’ He shakes with laughing; he shakes you and the bed with him. ‘Madonna Santa, Yusuf, back then I thought you’d run mad.’

‘You’re one to talk of terrible senses of humour,’ you retort. ‘What is that English phrase Andromache likes? Pots and kettles? But don’t forget the three horses,’ you add, trailing your hands up and down the quivering muscles of his back. ‘You stole my mare that time, as well, though I suppose I will count Giacinta as partial repayment. Did you ever return her?’

Old sorrow sleets across his face, there and gone like an out of season storm. ‘I gave her over to milady’s household when we left Jerusalem. Don’t you recall? I brought you that chestnut demon of a courser in her place.’

‘Ah, yes, Rahib. A demon indeed, and I have forgot so many more pleasant things. Why make make an effort on his behalf? We’ve grown old, beloved.’ You keep your hands moving over his back, up and down, familiar repetition that crosses centuries-old scars and unmarked new skin alike. ‘Though I suppose we do not look it.’

‘Mm. It jars me to see my face at thirty-six reflected back at me. I feel each year since as a stone weight in my mind.’

‘Imagine how it must be for Andromache.’

‘I can’t. I doubt I will unless we're still alive six thousand years from now.’ He lifts his head just enough to meet your eyes. ‘I love you,’ he tells you again, this time in your own tongue, much as you told him in his. He cups your cheek. ‘I’ve wanted none but you since you first killed me. I want none but you for whatever remains of this strange life of ours.’

‘It’s as well, then, that I’ve no present wish to be rid of you,’ you reply, and lean in to kiss him.
 

+
 

‘Jerusalem,’ you tell Nile when she asks. ‘In your year 1099. We killed one another outside the walls.’

‘Over and over,’ Nicolò puts in. ‘For all of a day and a night.’

He sounds like cloistered sex, all swallowed breath and throat-caught sound, and you would know. He fucked you in an Anjou nunnery once, halfway into the fifteenth century. He was even wearing a habit at the time, which only made the situation a thousand times more arousing than it already was. The stark purity of his profile framed by wimple and veil, and that sidelong look he gave you, a universe removed from purity... five hundred years later, the memory still gets you hard.

He’s smiling a little. Enough to turn the backwards slant of his bared throat indecent. The curve of his mouth is obscene.

Nile looks back and forth between you. ‘Oh hell no,’ she says, and ducks out of the room. ‘Andy,’ you hear her call as a door opens somewhere nearby, ‘get back out here and kill me some more, they’re being gross again.’

Distantly, Andy’s laughter rings out.

You look back over at him. He’s draped over his chair like the worst sort of suggestion: knees bent and dropped to either side, head propped on one hand. His other hand has slid down to rest against his leg, long fingers splayed on his thigh.

‘Are you going to stare or are you going to come over here and be gross with me?’ says your enemy, trading English for Masri as you both do when you’re alone.

‘Not sure,’ you say, pretending to think it over. ‘Is that rhetoric or a threat?’

He looks up at you from under deliberately heavy eyelids. ‘Come and find out.’

You grin at him even as you do his bidding. ‘And what will you do when they come back sooner than you want? As they will.’

‘I’ll tell them their choice of place and time is on them, not me, and also to go away,’ he says, and reaches up to pull you down.

You brace your hands on the arms of the chair and rest one knee on the seat between his open legs; he slides a hand down your chest to the waistband of your jeans and lingers there, pushing up under your shirt in search of bare skin. He lays his palm flat against your navel and tips his head back and to one side, his eyes on yours.

‘Going to fuck me?’ he asks. ‘Or would you rather stand there and think about fucking me?’

You shake your head at him. ‘And you call me impatient.’ You rear back and cup his face in your hands. Press a kiss to his forehead.

‘It’s that or stab you, babe,’ you tell him. ‘I don’t think I’m up for cleaning blood off the floor today.’

He’s laughing when he pulls you back down and kisses your mouth.

He tastes like coming back to life should feel.







I open my mouth to the wind. The wind
opens my heart, my breast. I leave the bare
bones behind.
(Donika Kelly)