#isterik

Erik’s arse hurt. 

No amount of talent as a horseman was going to compensate him for the agony of nearly a full day of riding through treacherous terrain, heading up a group of surly mercenaries whose main ambitions in life were drink, fight, fuck. He did not crave company, but a bodily feeling that was not a cramp, bruise or welt might be fun. Just for a change, like. 

His sanity was worn down enough that he attempted to engage the Chief in conversation. 

“Gallows.” He nodded at a shadow perhaps half a mile ahead. 

The Chief was not about to admit he couldn’t see it. “Do you envy them, Erik? We will make camp soon enough.”

“No. Just curious.” 

They approached the object in silence. As they got closer, it became clear that the individuals had not just been hung - they had been trapped in a single cage and left to starve. The cage was strewn with the remains of vegetable matter. 

Sodomites. 

Istvan left it until the scene was a decent way behind to say “That, Erik, is why we give no quarter.”

“Sir?”

The Chief’s voice was low enough to keep it between themselves. “We do not beg for permission to exist. We do not accept the fairy tale of heaven. We take what is ours and we do not wait for anyone’s blessing.” 

Erik chewed on this for a mile or so. 

“How do you…”

Istvan stared ahead, stonily. 

When he finally realised Istvan wasn’t going to prompt him, Erik finished “...how do you know?”

The Chief barely glanced at him, his mouth bunched up in that perpetual moue of contempt. “Know what, boy? Use your words.”

“If someone is… like you.” 

This won Erik more of a glance, but the same amount of contempt. “No-one’s like me. You should know that by now.” 

Well, that was certainly true, as far as Erik could know. He had certainly never seen anyone quite like Lord Toth, although he had only had about seventeen years to do it. 

“What about that man in Sasau?” 

Istvan’s next look made Erik, young and impulsive as he was, quite sure that he should probe very, very carefully. 

“...you looked at him differently, Sir.”

Erik had several seconds to wonder if he’d just made the most portentous mistake of his life. Then Istvan laughed. “I’ll make a spy of you yet, boy.” 

Emboldened, Erik explained himself. “You looked at him like you recognised him. But you’d never met.”

“How do you know that?”

“...I suppose I don’t - wait, no. You introduced yourself. You don’t do that for people you’ve met before.” 

“All right. What do you mean I looked at him like I recognised him? What does that look like, boy?”

Erik thought hard. After a few lengths of the fence they were following, he said “Your head raised a bit and… your face was more relaxed? Not as, you know,” drawing his index and middle finger downward towards the bridge of his nose. 

“I really need to be more discreet.” There was pride in Istvan’s voice as he said it. 

“But how did you know he was-” Erik turned his head to ensure no-one was close enough to hear. “You know.”

“I didn’t. You don’t know until you’ve got your cock in his mouth and even then you should assume nothing.” 

Erik tried very hard not to think about the Chief and cocks. “So you can’t tell? Ever?” 

“I didn’t say that. I said you should assume nothing. Unless you fancy ending up like our friends back there.”

“So what made you think…”

“What do you think?”

“That’s just it! I don’t know. He looked like any other man to me.”

“I should think so. There’s no sodomite livery, though I have always wondered about the Colleoni.”

They fell silent for some time, horses trudging through the rolling hillsides in a view that might have been stunning if Erik gave a shit. He distracted himself by thinking about the man in Sasau, who certainly had no obvious mannerisms - an ordinary hail-fellow-well-met, unremarkably clothed, neither very handsome nor very ugly, his Czech unaccented as far as Erik could tell. What was the Chief seeing? 

“Was he indiscreet? Did he, I don’t know… but that happened after you met him, and… you ended up in the barn somehow.”

Istvan frowned. “Which you should not have seen. I really need to watch myself.”

Erik was not about to confess that he saw it precisely because he was looking for it, had inferred correctly that the man from Sasau was not inviting Lord Toth to discuss local resources or strategic locations, and had been very fortunate that he had not had time to get his hand in his braies before Istvan spotted him and indicated in no uncertain terms that he should fuck off.

“Have you ever been caught?” 

“Plenty of times.” The Chief chose not to elaborate. 

“What happened?” 

Istvan shrugged. “Beatings. Being chased out of town. Couple of prison sentences.” 

“Prison??? How did you get out?”

A smile slowly cracked Istvan’s face. “Use your imagination, boy.” A pause for a couple of yards. “And close your mouth. A bird will fly into it.”

“Aren’t you worried about..?” He looked back at the gibbet, by now long out of sight, but burned forever into Erik’s memory. 

The Chief scoffed. “They haven’t built the gallows I’ll hang from yet, boy.” 

[10] [cw: withdrawals]

Erik wakes in the night to the earthquake tremors of Istvan’s shuddering.

“I won’t have you see me this way,” Istvan’s voice is low and coated in nasal fluid. He keeps his back turned and Erik presses his face to the soft skin over his lover’s spine, lets the small ridges fit around his cheekbones.

“Give the pain to me, I’ll hold it for you,” Erik begs of him.

.

When Erik was younger he saw a soldier quit the drink. This must have been close to what that man felt.

Yearning crawled up his neck and buried inside the base of his skull. It slithered down his arms, his legs. His toes would seize at odd moments. His chest had become a rattling cage of writhing tension. And nothing, nothing could sate it. No food, no booze, no poppy-laced drink. It was a cloying need that would not abate so long as Istvan’s fingers shriveled in the earth.

His only recourse was to endure, and that was no comfort at all.

The man had gone three days without a drop of alcohol before he had crawled on his knees through the camp, begging the others to let him have but a sip. Erik had avoided his shaking, grasping hands, shied away in horror at the maddened look on his face. Finally the sawbones had brought him watered wine, and bit by bit the man’s shuddering had eased. The physician told them the man would have seized and died without it.

Night by empty night Erik clasped his shaking, shivering limbs tighter to himself in the lonely hollow of their bed and prayed the same might be true for his sickness.

In his mind he knew he was dying. Yet his body continued to live.

.

The fourth memory was a thump that woke him in a sweat, his mind awake in a racing thread of words.

He killed my parents, Erik had told him.

What? Toth killed your parents?

Henry’s eyes were wide enough to see his lashes fanning around his eyelids.

You could never understand. They were weak. Istvan’s strong—he took better care of me than any father.

How could he remember only the remembering?

.