I wrote a story
The dead woman was having her hair cut for the first - and last - time. This symbol of her maidenhood fell around her bare feet in dirty, brittle chunks as the executioner sawed through it with a dagger, the weapon a delicate tool in his meaty hand. Unable to look at her face, the man in the crowd stared instead at the falling hair, appreciating the color of it in the high noon light. She was a blonde.
Suddenly, the crowd around him shifted, and the man lost sight of the prisoner. He bit his lip to avoid spitting an angry curse and instead wormed his way forward through the massive congregation of peasants and townsfolk who’d come to see bloodshed this day. Just as the councilors had hoped, they’d brought the vendors with them. The smell of the food they offered was as yet unspoiled by the odor of blood and the inviting aromas curled temptingly around his nose. What could taste better at an execution than honey cake? A smile touched his lips.
His smile remained till he saw a child sitting on his father’s shoulders, staring raptly at the scaffold; he sneered then. What sort of parent would bring their child here this day, to be swept away by bloodlust at such an early age?
A woman let out a protesting cry as he pushed her aside. He turned around, about to murmur an apology, but the words died on his lips when he saw her expression. Her face was set in the tight angry lines left behind by Hyrule’s royal plow, her eyes suspiciously narrowed. The look in those eyes conveyed all the emotions he was feeling, he knew, the same emotions that had drawn everyone else to this square: anger and resentment, and hope for a justice they’d never see, except in their dreams.
“I beg your pardon, goodwoman,” he said curtly, and proceeded forward.
He did not desire a mirror.
Up on the scaffold, the dead woman was apart from the excitement, serene in her immodest shift. Despite the insults thrown at her by commoners and noblemen alike, she held her body erect; her chin remained upturned as she was relieved of the burden of her hair and her lips moved, as if in prayer. Prayer was good for her, the man decided; if the Head Councilor told it true, she had much to atone for.
The man stopped to stare at her carefully composed face, seemingly invulnerable to outside stimulation. What a pity she must die today, he thought without feeling any pity at all. Had she been a tad less stubborn - had she bent before she broke - she might have preserved her life…
That much was true; she might have preserved her life, if only for a year or two, before the Hyrulian People’s Council grew weary of seeing her within Hyrule Castle and executed her as it had her royal father. Much like his daughter, the late King of Hyrule had failed to recognize the dangers of his increasingly discontent citizenry. He had not stopped them when they created their council to protest the bloated tax laws and other injustices set upon them, instead laughing at the folly of a room of common men snatching power from a king descended from a line a thousand years old. Now it was they who laughed as they passed his tar-blackened head speared above Hyrule Castle Town’s gates.
Today it was Princess Zelda’s turn to be punished for whatever her crime had been - perhaps laughing at the councilors too, or protesting one of their laws too loudly, or harboring dark thoughts against them in her mind - her turn to be crushed under the heel of the council’s inexorable will.
He tore himself away from his thoughts just in time to see the hooded executioner pull back from the young woman, a long lock of her hair clutched in one of his hands. All that remained of the princess’s hair was tufts and stubble, leaving her neck exposed to the axe. When she had requested that her hair be cut off prior to her death, there had been nothing but boldness and courage in her frigid eyes; now she had to feel what she’d done to herself. Her bare arms jerked, fighting against the bonds that held them behind her back, and a rude noise grew in the sweltering summer air as the crowd voiced its disapproval.
Like the princess, the man held himself apart from the crowd, most of who carried up the cry without seeing what she’d done. A crowd was a strange animal, he reflected. In an instant, with a suspect glance or movement or sound, the crowd could become a mob, living with one purpose; they became a gathering of people fused into one organism. He wanted to avoid becoming part of that for as long as possible.
Before the princess could try at freedom again, the Head Councilor stepped up onto the scaffold amidst cheers. Tall and slim, with foreign good looks, the Head Councilor was the youngest of the council at only twenty-eight. He had been a soldier before he’d turned to dubious politics, projecting charisma even when guarding the Death Mountain Gate in Kakariko; with this as common knowledge, his fellow council members had found him an easy choice when deciding who would lead them. Most of them seemed oblivious to the fact that he had abandoned his choice to defend his country when the task no longer benefited him.
The man knew it was easier to desert a task the second time than it had been the first, so he did not join the crowd in their cheers.
The Head Councilor was dressed all in black, his surcoat bearing the council’s coat of arms - the Golden Power in the center of a circle of linked hands. He nodded at the executioner and then faced forward, holding up his hands for silence. The crowd responded by cheering louder, and the man took advantage of the crowd’s distraction by inching closer to the scaffold.
When finally the crowd fell silent, the councilor cleared his throat and smiled his handsome smile. Then with a quickness that was startling, his face fell into somber blankness. “Citizens of Hyrule,” he began, “here in the square of Hyrule Castle Town, Princess Zelda Hyrule stands before you, convicted of treasons against her country, of fornication-”
All this time the princess had stood stoic - while the executioner guided the dagger so close to her tender neck, while the crowd hurled insults at her, even when the Head Councilor came to the scaffold - but as he spoke, her expression crumbled to something almost human. “Lies!” she shouted. “I am still a maiden, and personal grievances you hold against me are not treasons!”
The crowd was not swayed; the council’s emotional propaganda had spread too far, affected too many. A chorus of boos met her words, and as she closed her mouth, flying spittle hit her cheek. The man was now close enough to the scaffold to see it, as well as he saw that she made no sign of feeling it.
The Head Councilor’s high, dark brow contracted as he turned to face Princess Zelda’s contemptuous blue gaze. “Be silent!” he ordered; his words were just loud enough to carry. “You had your chance to speak in trial, but you forfeited that chance to allow the goddesses to decide the outcome by wager of battle. Your champion failed to appear. That is proof enough of your guilt.”
It was clear the princess resented being told to keep her silence; challenge glittered in her eyes. But behind her composed - and slightly angry - mask, the man in the crowd spied an immense sadness, a resigned submission, lurking. Probably because of this sadness, the dead woman was silent and lowered her eyes.
Satisfied, the Head Councilor turned back to address his crowd, his glorious creation. “The Princess Zelda Hyrule stands before you,” he began anew, “convicted of treasons against her country and fornication. She must now pay for her crimes through pain of death. If the princess has any last words, let her speak them now.”
The princess nodded at the executioner and he led her forward. She surveyed the crowd with emotionless eyes, her chin still proudly upturned. “I am your rightful ruler, your queen!” she said to everyone and no one. “Whatever else you would believe of me, know this: I am no whore, and no turncloak! I love Hyrule; I love it, and would never do anything to corrupt its integrity as this usurper would have you believe. If any traitor dwells among us, it is this man, who thinks he can snatch power from the Queen of Hyrule with impunit-”
The rest of her words, whatever they might be, were drowned out by the sound of the crowd’s displeasure. The man watched from the front edge of the scaffold as again she lowered her eyes and allowed the executioner to pull her unresistingly back.
“It’s time to pay for your crimes,” the Head Councilor whispered.
He must have made some sign. On cue, two soldiers wearing the council’s coat of arms joined the gathering on the scaffold; their faces were hard, unreadable. Ignoring the Head Councilor, they grabbed the princess by either arm and led her forcibly to the chopping block and her destiny.
Down in the crowd, the man was made uneasy by the sudden silence. The expressions on the faces around him were anticipatory; mouths were opening though never producing sound. They were not respecting the solemnity of the moment with their silence, he knew - many cheers had been heard when the old king met his fate. No, he thought - their voices had just been robbed from them by the power of their anticipation. Anticipation of the death of the monarchy with that of the princess? Anticipation of the sight of blood? Or something more sinister? It was impossible for him to fathom.
She fell to her knees before the chopping block as if her legs had lost the power to support her, her eyes closing and a sigh escaping her lips. Without waiting for the soldiers to force her, she laid her head on the chopping block, nuzzling the wood with one cheek as though it were a lover. Apparently satisfied that she would stay, the soldiers melted away…and the executioner turned to retrieve his axe.
The crowd was silent.
The princess positioned her head so that the crowd could see her face: the closed eyes, the flushed cheeks, the lips still moving in prayer. A fine tremble seemed to move up and down the length of her body as she awaited the first blow, and as a strong humid wind picked up, the man could see her dirty discarded hair scatter to wherever the winds went.
He knew what he must do.
The executioner had not yet picked up his axe when the man vaulted onto the scaffold. Someone in the crowd screamed and the Head Councilor took several surprised steps backward, but not quickly enough. An elbow to the face was all it took to make him stumble back at a faster pace, shrieking as he held a hand to his broken nose.
The princess had not yet opened her eyes, and still her body trembled. What must she have been thinking as she awaited her death? the man wondered for a split second. Did she imagine herself already executed, and hearing naught but the screams of the dead? It made no matter to him as he stared with cold eyes at the writhing councilor - but what of the soldiers?
With a cry, a soldier threw himself onto the man’s back, while another came at him with a forward thrust of his sword. Using the poor fool’s momentum, the man threw the soldier over his shoulders and into the one rushing him. Both went down in a tangle of limbs and pained groans, but it was debatable how long they would stay that way. Guards lining the sides of the scaffolds started to reach for their swords.
The crowd began to stir as he ran across the scaffold to meet the executioner: murmurs, rude noises, and the scrape of steel against sheaths met his ears. The executioner turned to face the man; the dull steel of gleam of his dagger winked in his hand. Knowing he could waste no time, the man kicked the executioner in the face in one fluid movement. As he bent over with a groan, the man disarmed him, pocketed the weapon, and picked up the axe from where it lay.
“What-?”
The princess raised her head, looking around with huge, disoriented eyes. Those intense eyes stayed on the man, her dubious savior, as if she couldn’t believe him to be more than a dream’s fancy. Perhaps she couldn’t.
Although he felt her pale blue gaze on him still, the man forced himself to concentrate on the axe, the weight and feel of it in his hands. In front of him, the executioner was wiping blood from his running nose, shaking his head to reorient himself; he was the first to recover, the toughest of them all. But when he saw his own weapon in the hands of another, his eyes widened, and he turned to run into the roaring, jeering crowd.
He was out of time. As soon as he turned, the man lifted the axe above his head…and buried its edge into the middle of the executioner’s back. The larger man made no sound as he fell to his knees, but a woman in the crowd screamed when the man pried the axe free and let it fall to the scaffold.
A handkerchief stained red was plastered to the Head Councilor’s crushed nose; he was staring at the man, the murderer, with a tense mixture of hatred and fear in his eyes. “Get the princess!” he ordered his waiting soldiers. “Kill him! Kill them both!”
His work was far from done, and it seemed that time had slowed to a pace adequate for him to perform his duty. Leaving the executioner to drown in a spreading pool of his own blood, the man went to the waiting princess, kneeling beside her. The dagger was already in his hand and he slipped it between her wrists. “Hold still or you’ll make me cut you,” he commanded.
The uncertainty he thought had been in her eyes hardened to something else - anger? Stubbornness? “Who are you?” she whispered; definitely angry, he surmised. “What do you mean by touching me this way…oh, Nayru! You cut me!”
The sharp blade cut easily through the hemp that tied her hands, but it sliced one of her wrists open in the process. He looked down at the wound with passionless eyes. “Whoops,” he said blandly. There was blood on one of his index fingers. He brought it to his mouth and imagined he could distinguish between the taste of her blood and the executioner’s.
She looked as it she were about to slap him when the fletching of an arrow brushed his cheek and nearly pinned her to the scaffold; then she screamed. Looking up, the man spied archers up in the second story windows of a nearby brothel, their bows starkly visible. It was time to leave.
He grabbed her by the arm and made her stand as he did, ignoring the flash of outrage and annoyance in her eyes. “Come away,” he urged.
She stared at him, uncomprehending and unwilling to comprehend. The crowd surged, and all around them, soldiers were climbing up onto the scaffold.
“Come away, or you shall die.” The man looked at her expectantly. He knew that he could have carried her off by force, but…something in her stubbornness made him want her acceptance before he acted even further in her behalf, even at risk to their lives. His patience was rewarded. A moment passed and the anger in her eyes softened; she nodded mutely.
As the Head Councilor made a wild grab for the princess’s bleeding wrist, the man dragged her along behind him while running to the back edge of the scaffold, moving in an odd serpentine motion to avoid the hail of arrows raining down from the brothel’s windows. Directly behind the scaffold was a vendor’s stall offering sausages, surrounded by yet another tight-packed crowd. With barely a thought, he jumped onto the cheap tarp spread like an awning over the stall, and his grip on the princess ensured she did the same.
A moment later, the tarp ripped and the two now-fugitives fell staring up at the vendor who had a cooked sausage in either hand. Recognition flashed in the vendor’s eyes; he tried to seize the princess, but the man stood and flung the small grill in his direction. The vendor made no further attempt to impede their path.
Grabbing a handful of glowing coals from beneath the upturned grill, the man threw them into the crowd to disperse the curious populace and to clear a path for their escape. Thanks to adrenaline, he did not feel the pain nor the blisters rising on his right hand, just as he didn’t acknowledge the princess screaming out, “Don’t, you’ll kill yourself!”
As quickly as possible, he pulled her to her feet, his mind already whirling with possibilities. “This way.” He moved through the gap left by the dispersed crowd at a quick pace, elbowing aside all those who thought to impede him. Some of those who witnessed their escape stared in stupefied amazement; others tried to grab at the princess, screaming vile curses. Their faces and actions all seemed to blur together, each one no different than the last - and then the square with its crowd was behind them, giving way to a deserted alleyway.
He dared to look behind him and for a moment his heart froze. The shining helms of soldiers were starkly visible, growing larger as they came after them. The princess saw as well, and apparently seizing on some sudden burst of courage, she began to lead the two of them forth. He acquiesced to her actions, too shocked to do otherwise. They both had the same general idea, in any case: to get as far away from the council’s soldiers as possible.
Their struggle increased in earnest then. Behind them they could hear the soldiers chasing them, shouting both threats and promises as they ran. Both of them knew the fate that awaited them if they were caught, and so their weariness decreased in importance as their desire for survival became more pronounced. They passed alehouses and brothels without count, which brought with them the smell of mingled wine and semen. They passed houses whose inhabitants had long since left them in favor of the execution. They passed an open barrel of a fishmonger’s wares, whose contents were bloated and stinking, long past consumption. Here the princess considered, stopped, pivoted. Her foot shot out, overturning the barrel in a heartbeat. As slimy trout slid over the cobbles, temporarily blocking the way forward for the soldiers after them, the man felt both a newfound respect for the princess and an affirmation of his decision to save her.
That would only be a minor impediment, the man knew, so as soon as the princess faced him again he took her hand anew, urging her to run as swiftly as possible. Despite the adrenaline running through him, he could feel the breath in his lungs coming heavier and heavier, his burned hand beginning to throb painfully as they ducked into one alley and out of the next. The hand holding the princess’s felt slick with her blood, a grim reminder of their dire position that even the sound of the soldiers happening upon their makeshift surprise couldn’t wipe away.
Sudden pain bloomed in his right thigh and the ground came up to meet him. Then the princess was before him, screaming at him, grasping at him with feeble fingers. “Get up!” she cried, over and over as she tried to help him aright. “We must be away. Get up!”
His leg was on fire and he could taste blood in his mouth. I can’t let her be taken, he thought. Shakily he got to his feet and took the princess’s hand, for a moment barely feeling the arrow lodged in his thigh. There was no time to consider where it might have come from; with barely a pause they resumed their pace - amended now to a mere hobble - every step drilling a spike of pain into the man that seemed to encompass his entire body. Behind them, the man could hear the soldiers advancing on them, the sounds of their armor and outrage rising higher and higher.
All the while, past his pain, the man was counting alleys beneath his breath. This area of the Castle Town was no different from how it had been when last he’d seen it…they were so close…here.
Abruptly they turned into an alley whose buildings were so close they almost touched, his cheap traction-less boots slipping on the cobbles, his legs reacting badly to the shock. Gritting his teeth against the throbbing pain, the man dug his fingers into the princess’s hand, looking left and right till he spied a nondescript door. Trying the knob availed nothing and he soon discovered why: the jamb was all but rusted shut.
“Dammit!” Beside him, the princess was sobbing quietly, but he never heard her. Very aware the soldiers chasing them could discover their whereabouts at any moment, the man enacted a new plan; he steeled himself and threw his weight against the unyielding door. It budged just slightly at the contact, which was almost enough to make him forget the way his wounded thigh throbbed in protest. Twice more and the door gave way. He all but pushed the princess into the newly revealed opening before following her himself, slapping the door shut behind them.
His eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness. They were in the front room of an abandoned wine sink, all but empty save for a few rough-hewn chairs and the makeshift bar near the back. The smell of dust and age was enough to make nostalgia rise in his chest, but he managed to ignore it for the moment. Grabbing a cobweb-covered chair leg, he used it to bar the door and no sooner than he did that he heard the sound of men searching for them outside. The hard truth was staring him in the face then, though he wanted to deny it: they wouldn’t be safe here for long.
The pain in his leg was his overriding thought, growing in intensity the longer he stood upon it. Seeing the princess pressed against one of the walls, he hobbled over to her, leaning against the wall so that most of his weight was supported on it. After a pause he touched the shoulder of the woman beside him; she was shaking, moaning, the sound more like a high keening wail that came from the back of her throat. Coupled with the sounds of search from without and the pain running sluggishly through his veins, it was enough to drive him mad. “Shut up,” he growled, clutching her body close against his as if that would silence her. “Do you want them to find us now, after all we’ve done? Shut up!”
“Stop it, stop it! Let me go!” Her hands slapped at his chest, fluttering weakly against it like feeble birds trapped in flight.
He never stopped her. When finally her rage quieted the man turned her loose, looking down at his tunic in distaste; there was a long streak of blood where her wounded wrist had touched him. Looking up again, he saw that she’d increased the distance between them so that her back was pressed against the door; her chest was heaving and there were tears in her eyes. For a while they were both silent, him detachedly listening to the sounds of search outside while she shook and grew increasingly paler. Clearly she was feeling the effects of blood loss, but now that seemed somehow unimportant…his mind was growing cloudy…
“Who are you?” she whispered finally, with all the sternness she could apparently muster in her current state. “Do you…do you mean to kill me here, so that the Head Councilor is not seen with the blood on his hands? I’ll have your name!”
“You’ll have nothing of the sort,” the man said, his voice flat with disapproval, her contrariness awakening a resentment of his own. “It’s enough that I saved you. If I had known what trouble you turned out to be, I would have left you to the tender mercies of the People’s Council.”
“Your name!”
“My name…” He trailed off, what he planned to say obscured behind a sudden wave of raw emotion. Awkwardly he fell to one knee before this dead woman, silently declared his queen, thanks to some defect that shamed him even as he spoke. “Zelda, by the goddesses, don’t you remember me? I am Link - Link! Your father meant me to be your champion, but if you’ll have me now, gladly will I serve as your protector.”
I have no idea what I want to do with the plot. Roffles. :(