A Murderer's Son: A Zelink Story

Chapter 23

The room was candlelit and silent, apart from the gentle, weak breaths of Link beside us. Me and one of the other men, Drax, were sat either side of his bed. I was facing him, his head to the side on the pillow, his eyes droopily open, his lips slightly parted as soft trails of air flowed in and out in monotonous order.

Link, when he had arrived a month earlier, had been lively as anything. He had even forced me to take him out, on hikes and horserides and sunrise walks. He had wanted more than anything to escape the confined, tense space of the village. His father had struck him to the ground when he first arrived, teeming with fury and frustration. To his surprise, though, Link didn't get up. He was too busy coughing up blood.

He ate with us in the hall. He told jokes and stories and sang with us, even if his father was far too upset to make the most of his final few weeks. The rest of the men spent their time distracting him, keeping him happy and laughing and trying to make out like this wasn't such a big deal.

One day, though, he'd collapsed to the floor when going to leave the hall. From then on, he was too weak to leave his bed in the medical tent.

Still, whilst bedridden and weaker by the day, he still stayed up all night, propped up with pillows, cracking jokes and telling the most elaborate stories to the crowds of men who joined him every night to keep him company. His spirit was still lively and playful, his voice still loud, his smile still evident. He spoke in detail of Zelda. And at one point, whilst eating in his bed, he claimed that he and Zelda didn't share a connection; a fact that I knew to be a lie, but the others were oblivious.

"So you're really telling me you spent three weeks with this princess, bearing in mind you're a ten, and you didn't sleep with her?", one of the others asked.

A tense moment had just began to settle in the tent as Link swallowed his food before he uttered in the most composed of manners, "Well I never said that," Causing an uproar to ripple through the tent and a subdued laugh to creep across his face.

He was still Link. That tiny medical tent, every night, was bursting with laughter and rowdy conversation. And once a day, I'd take him out of that tiny space to go walking round the place, to sit at his favourite lookout spot and peer out across the desert. His spirit was still alight.

Until one sun-baked day, when he sat up for his breakfast. His eyebags had grown. His skin was paler. He was bruising, for no reason at all, and his voice was raspier, and he was finding it harder to breathe. But the most noteable thing about him was the lack of a smile on his face.

He tried to smile, of course. But I knew that this was it. This was the beginning of the end. We all knew it, really. We tried to keep him distracted the same way as before, but it wasn't the same anymore. He couldn't give the same energy back, no matter how much he tried. We couldn't keep denying the fact that he was dying.

We sat with him when he ate, cheering him on with every bite, since it had suddenly become painful for him to swallow. He looked exhausted with every movement he made, but he really did try for us. Even when laying in bed with the candles still lit, he'd try to laugh for us. But every time he did, he'd begin to cough again. So we just told him that it was okay, that he didn't need to try for us. We were just here to keep him company.

"Don't worry about it, man," We would say. "We know you're laughing on the inside. Clearly. Because we're hilarious."

And we even turned it into a joke, so he wouldn't feel like we were dying with him. "Guys, I think Link might be a secret virgin. Laugh if you disagree, Link," One of them would say. We would always see a playful grin softly play out on his lips, letting us know that he was still there. He would still talk to us, but it happened less frequently. He'd save his voice for the real important stuff, so he wouldn't cough as much.