Everlasting Hero

a TR flash

 

He stood sweating on Hannibal's flagship, skewering Rhodian marines as they leapt screaming onto the rough wood deck with their bloody knives held aloft. 

 

There, near the mouth of the Eurymedon, Seleucid ships burned to the waterline and sank like stones.  Proud men fought into the night, their aim guided by fires and fury. He stood firm, striking blow after blow until his arms were nothing but painful weights to lever high.

 

But all was lost, the noise and flags for nothing.

 

Hannibal fled, defeated, and birds pecked the eyeballs of drowned heroes.

 

Later, he stood atop the Roman garrison at Vaga and watched as enraged Numidians set fire to the barricades and tore at fortifications with bare fingers.  

 

He took a spear in the chest for his commander, Silanus, who hid when the heavy iron-banded gate came crashing down and Numidian horsemen poured in like water. 

 

If Jupiter Optimus Maximus, king of heaven, was watching, he gave no sign.

 

When Wen Chou led 6,000 light cavalry from the Yuan camp, he stood in the ambuscade beside discarded piles of loot and armor, holding his breath and waiting for the command to strike.  Hearing it, he rode out just two swift horse-lengths behind Cao Cao, pike in the air and a fell light in his eyes. 

 

They rode down like devils and ate up the dust of their enemies, emerging victorious. 

 

He impaled Wen Chou himself, earning a flashing white smile from the grimy face of his commander, before an arrow pierced his lung and left him bubbling rose-colored foam, body slack across his horse. 

 

Light left his black eyes just as the sun went down on the western horizon.

 

He wore French colours with d'Albret when hungry Englishmen crossed the Somme, his ranks then following like shadows, calling a semonce des nobles in the king's name. 

 

A bolt from an English longbow brought him low, to lie gasping for air on the field of Agincourt where the fleur-de-lis was trodden into the mud.

 

Rain and guts and blood of French blue turned the ground to mire.

 

On Bosworth Field, he stood tall with King Richard against the Pretender, his girt sword bright with polish and sharper than the northern winds. 

 

He held 24 hostages at swordpoint for Talbot's loyalty, always suspect. 

 

Some men have no honor and must be held to their word with steel, metal for metal, Richard had said with a dark smile.  He had warmed inside at the sight, that smile, loving his brave king more than his own life, as good men should. 

 

When a Welshman felled his king with one stroke of an enormous poleaxe, he wept as he fought on, killing the Welshman and fourteen others before the bowel-cut that stopped him cold.

 

But not cold enough.

 

He would have given anything under heaven to share that shallow grave near Greyfriars, now covered with a concrete carpark, with his beloved Richard, last Plantagenet.

 

If wishes were horses, some heroes would die.