The Forest

“Do it now!” Louis screamed, only wanting to feel that arrow slide into his brain so he could embrace oblivion and death. “For gods’ sakes, Silvius, do it now!”

Silvius took firm hold of the arrow with both his hands, and pushed down.

Louis tensed, terrified, yet glad it would soon be over.

Silvius pushed the tip of the arrow into the bone of Louis’ left orbit, and twisted, grinding the arrowhead slowly deeper and deeper, mangling bone and nerve endings both.

If Louis had thought he was in pain before, then this was suffering such as he’d never known. The pain in his hand was bad enough as the shaft of the arrow twisted slowly through flesh and bone, but what the arrowhead did to his skull was indescribably agonising.

Worse was the terrible knowledge that Silvius knew what he was doing. He could have easily sunk that arrowhead through the rear of Louis’ orbit and deep into his brain, killing him instantly, but he chose not to.

Louis’ left hand beat uselessly at Silvius, his feet kicking more uselessly. None of the blows made any difference. It was as though Silvius was totally insubstantial save for those terrible hands, gripping the shaft of the arrow.

Thus you have brutalised me for three thousand years, Silvius whispered into Louis’ mind. Thus have I suffered.

Louis managed to speak. “I…killed you…instantly. There was no…suffering.”

There was no suffering? To see my own beloved son come up to me, his face expressionless, to see him look at the arrow, look at my kingship bands, and then look back to the arrow in my eye with an expression of such murderous ambition on his face that all I had ever been, all I had ever loved, was murdered with that single look? That was not suffering? Do you know what it is like, Brutus-William-Louis, to be murdered by that person you have loved the most?

He ground the arrowhead back and forth, back and forth, scraping terrible grooves in Louis’ orbit.

“Father…kill me now. I beg you!”

You think this is suffering? Do you not know that your greatest suffering, your greatest despair, is yet to come?

And then, dimly, gradually, Louis became aware that someone else was standing at his side, and he knew it was James.

And he knew what James held in his hand, and, perhaps understandably, Louis thought that the greater suffering Silvius referred to would be at the hands of James.