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After Nahuseresh cut himself on Eugenides’ hook, he barked a command in Mede to his guards, and I heard the sounds of scuffling and fighting. “Get off of me,” Eugenides protested, but his speech was slurred and whatever they were doing to him apparently continued unabated. I heard fabric sliding against fabric and then I heard a seam ripping, bit by bit as if it were being yanked apart with someone’s bare hands.
Eugenides cursed at his captors. One of them hit him, and there was a thud, and the king was quiet for a while except the occasional groan of pain.
I crept forward slowly, listening with increasing horror and disgust as Nahuseresh and Bu-Seneth tried to coerce the king to treason with words and then with violence. When I was finally able to maneuver into a position where I could see what was going on without revealing myself, I saw that they had stripped him entirely of his clothes and had managed to remove his hook as well.
It was hardly the first time I had seen a grown man naked. In fact it was hardly the first time I had seen a grown man naked and crumpled on the ground in pain—as a young child I had lurked many a time behind a bush and watched men wrestle in a dirt pit at the villa, and during my time in the palace I sometimes watched the soldiers wrestle in a training field adjacent to the ones used for sword practice. I was fascinated by the sturdiness of their bodies, the smooth coordination with which they moved. It was all in good sport, but injuries happened regardless, some worse than others.
What I had never before seen was the gleeful brutality with which Nahuseresh used the situation to torment and humiliate Eugenides. I had only previously encountered scenes like this in marble, in mosaics, in paint: motionless, fantastical. I kept expecting it to stop so that I could inspect it as if through the lens of history and be spared having to see all this happen to a living person, a person whom I knew and, in my own way, loved.
But it did not, and I was horrified. Not because Eugenides was my king, I think—although that certainly made it worse—but because I was in the room with a type of cruelty that I, even accustomed to cruelty as I was, had only ever seen before at the safe remove provided by art.
Nahuseresh insulted Eugenides’ sexual fitness and abilities, saying some things which I did not understand and some things which I understood all too well but for the sake of both the king and the queen I will not repeat. He prodded the king’s genitals with the pointed toe of his boot, and when that failed to elicit any reaction, he stepped on them with his heel—Eugenides was lying on his back, and the way the flesh squished and shifted under the pressure made my stomach lurch—getting mud on his skin. Eugenides’ breath thinned to a wheeze and his fingers dug into the carpet.
“Maybe I will do you a favor,” said Nahuseresh, leaning more weight on. “Maybe I will send you home to your bitch queen unable to put any more of your poisonous seed in her. If you really love her, you should thank me.”
Eugenides spat at him, but it was feeble. The bloody saliva landed on his own shoulder. “How many children do you have, Nahuseresh?” he asked, sounding as if one of the elephants he was so fond of were standing on his lungs. “Has any woman ever suffered your company for so much as a minute without a secret motive?”
“Be quiet!” Nahuseresh lifted his foot and stomped on Eugenides’ abdomen, driving his heel down over and over again like someone trying and failing to kill a mouse. At least once, his foot came down directly on the pale scar that lay across the king’s belly; it didn’t look like he was aiming for it on purpose, but it was a big scar.
Finally Bu-Seneth said “Enough, enough! I want him alive.” Nahuseresh delivered one final kick and then begrudgingly relented. Eugenides rolled over onto his side, grimacing, curling his arms around himself. For a moment I thought he might be sick, but he just coughed and spat out a mouthful of blood.
“Look, he is ruining your rug,” said Nahuseresh, who obviously did not care at all about Bu-Seneth’s rug but was not going to disregard any possible scrap of evidence he might use to impugn the king. He kicked him again, in the shin this time to avoid Bu-Seneth’s ire.
Bu-Seneth had nothing to say to that. He did not look like the kind of man who was particularly attached to finery. “You can end this now, Eugenides,” he reminded the king. “Surrender, and you go free, your men pardoned, your women unbesmirched.” There was a basket of bread and a jug of olive oil on the table; he poured some of the oil out into a small dish, tore a piece of bread, dipped it, and ate, awaiting an answer. Eugenides gave no indication he had heard him.
Nahuseresh walked over to the table and inspected the items on it as if seeing them for the first time. At first I thought he was hungry and was going to take some bread for himself, but instead he picked up one of the candlesticks and removed the candle from it. The candles on the table had not been lit; there was enough light from the fire and from the daylight that came in through the opening at the top of the tent where smoke escaped.
Standing over Eugenides’ prone form again and wielding the candlestick like a club, Nahuseresh ordered the guards out. Previously, they had obeyed his orders, but now they hesitated, looking to Bu-Seneth.
Bu-Seneth looked at Nahuseresh. He looked at the candlestick in Nahuseresh’s hand. He looked at Eugenides sprawled face-down and naked on the floor, barely breathing. “Alive,” he said at length to Nahuseresh, emphasizing his earlier point—I surmised he was worried Nahuseresh would beat the king to death with the hefty candlestick if left to his own devices, and I worried about that too. Nahuseresh inclined his head in agreement. Then, slowly, Bu-Seneth nodded to the guards, and out they went. Baron Erondites went with them, looking like he had tasted something sour; Ion Nomenus stayed to guard the entrance, disconcertingly close to where I was hidden.
Eugenides had been lying very still; I thought maybe he had passed out from the pain. He stirred slightly when Nahuseresh rolled him over so he lay face-down. But when Nahuseresh knelt with a knee on the back of his thigh, put one hand on his rear, and lined up the end of the candlestick to start forcing it into his body, he started thrashing like a mad dog, kicking and clawing and snarling, even weak and injured as he was. Nahuseresh was caught off guard. “Hold him, hold him!” he cried to Bu-Seneth.
The general obliged, and then, leaning his knee across the back of Eugenides’ shoulders to keep him pinned down, he reached to pick up the jug of olive oil from the table. He handed it to Nahuseresh. “Alive,” he emphasized again.
The candlestick was thick—thicker in some places than in others—and made of dark wood. If not for the fact that I had seen it with a candle atop it earlier I might have mistaken it for a spice mill. It was as long as my forearm (although admittedly I was small even for my age). I didn’t know what frightened me more: that they might fail to shove it into him (and end up taking their anger out in some unfathomably worse way), or that they might succeed.
They succeeded, with the help of the oil. Eugenides convulsed underneath them, clawing at the carpet, unable to scramble out from under their knees and hands. Bit by bit they forced it into his body, Nahuseresh sneering and laughing and saying that he expected a skinny Eddisian boy to know how to take it. Eventually Eugenides went pliant under him, shivering and occasionally coughing. It became easier for the stick to push in and out of his body—it put me in mind of how butter softens in the heat, and I think the only reason I wasn’t sick at the sight of it was that my stomach was as paralyzed with horror as my limbs were.
By the time Nahuseresh finally decided he’d had enough of violating Eugenides and pulled the candlestick out, it was shiny and slick with oil almost all the way along its length, except for the section at the end where he had been holding it. I fixed my eyes on a particular geometric knot pattern in the rug, afraid of what else I might see on the stick if I kept looking directly at it.
A grunt of anger and a blur of movement in my peripheral vision was all the notice I had before Nahuseresh swung the stick down with full force on Eugenides’ hand. I heard two bones snap like twigs—it might have been three. Eugenides whimpered and pressed his face into the carpet, kicking feebly. Ion Nomenus, whose continued presence I had almost forgotten about in his perfect silence, inhaled through his teeth.
Nahuseresh tossed the candlestick aside and went to the water basin near the tent wall to wash his hands. Despite my best efforts, the pattern in the rug lost its ability to hold my gaze, and I looked at Eugenides’ hand. A smear of oil across the back of it shone like gold in the firelight, marred with streaks of something darker.
Bu-Seneth also stood, but he stayed near Eugenides’ prone form and began to unfasten his trousers. Nahuseresh glanced back at them over his shoulder, and his eyes widened. “You’re not going to actually—”
“Shut up,” Bu-Seneth said, and took his member out as if he were going to relieve himself. My first thought was that there was something wrong with it: once he had his trousers out of the way, it stood almost straight out from his body, heavy and stiff. He knelt between Eugenides’ spread legs; he put his hands on Eugenides’ hips and hauled him up onto his knees, and then, impossibly, disgustingly, he pushed that part of himself inside of Eugenides’ body.
I had expected Eugenides to fight back as he had when Nahuseresh first violated him. He didn’t. He lay face-down, chest slumped against the rug, and whimpered in a way that I had never heard before and have never heard since, not even when they burned him with the fire iron. Shamefully, I was glad his face was turned away from me—I did not want to see what his expression looked like then.
When Bu-Seneth’s hips were flush with Eugenides’ rear, he let out a prolonged groan of satisfaction, tipping his head back. He stayed like that for a little while, sometimes making little movements with his hips.
He pulled out and wiped himself off with the discarded fabric that had been Eugenides’ shirt. The event had not been what I expected—the position reminded me of stray dogs coupling by the side of the road, but there had been none of that frantic thrusting. After he had refastened his trousers, he bent down and half-dragged, half-rolled Eugenides to a place further from the fire and further from me, where he lay on the packed dirt instead of on the rug. My view of the king was mostly obscured by the firepit—I could only see his lower legs and his feet.
A few minutes after that, I heard Eugenides inhale sharply and I saw his legs tense up. He let out a low, shaky sob, tensing further, squirming, and soon there was a wet sound, a trickle at first but then more, and I smelled urine. At the time I assumed his own bladder had reached its capacity and he’d had to empty it. I remember it was some time—weeks, perhaps—before I suddenly understood what must have happened, and when I did, I wept.