Chapter Text
Searing pain. He couldn’t even open his eyes. The blood had dried and clumped his hair, it dried on his skin, shutting his eyes closed. He had fought, tooth and nail, to the last man standing. He wasn’t standing. He lie alongside many of both his and the enemies’ men but he was convinced he was the only one still breathing. Macbeth knew this was where it ended. The witches, those devilish fiends, had told him that he had nothing to fear! Well the didn’t say that they had said he was safe till the forest moved towards his castle.
‘Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill.’
The forest has moved. The forest had closed in around him as it moved ever nearer and with it brought his inescapable demise. He was about to die. He thought it was impossible. That he was safe as they had said that ‘For none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.’ Every man was woman born! That young boy who stood before him and asked his name had been woman born and so he was slain.
Macduff was not born of women, no he was untimely ripped! Macduff. A man he had avoided as he was the only thing he feared. A man he was warned about but had believed was unable to harm him for all were woman born but no. Macduff was not woman born, he was cut out of his mother. The apparition, the ghastly things that even now, many days past, still pierced his skull and tainted the sleep he had. He was barely holding onto the unravelled scraps before. His fear of Macduff has been echoed. They had chanted his name, they had chanted to beware. ‘Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! Beware Macduff!’
The words rang in his ears like screams on the battle fields. So close and yet tens and thousands of feet away. Like the soldiers that charged towards him, like the forest. It moved towards him.
He had ignored their warnings, buried his fear. How blind he was. How stupid.
Macduff moved towards him. Brandishing his sword which was already dripping with Macbeth’s blood. The sword smoked, the steel gleamed. Macbeth could barely see him march towards him through the blood. Again he was bling but not blind, he could see clearly his mistakes and yet the grim reaper was merely a figure. His fate crept towards him but he couldn’t see it and yet it was clearer than any day he had seen. This was a foul way to die and yet it seemed a fair punishment.
Macduff grabbed his hair, yanking him up from where he had lay on the ground. He would not kneel at Malcolm’s feet and yet here he lie. His right arm dragged along the floor and his sword lay just out of reach. The blood dripped from his head into his mouth yes and the blood dripped form his cheeks, down, down till it stained the ground he had lied on. The cuts were deep and burned but they were scratches, compared to the pain in his arm. Macduff had twisted it, shattered the bone and broke the concrete fury of the mad king. The ties that had kept his sword bound to his hand had only made the Thane of Fife more brutal in his acts of disarming him of his weapon. It lay forgotten.
Macbeth would have liked to had last words. Or even a word, but his mouth was filled with a sea of incarnadine and his breath was caught in his throat, ribs battered and bruised. His breathe was raspy, almost gone. Macduff raised his arm to bring down the final blow to end his life. The hellhound had finally come to drag him to the deepest pits of hell where the equivocator, the tailor and the farmer waited, accompanied by Beelzebub. He swore he saw the witches as he walked towards them, the three who faced the same fate as him.
Macbeth snapped out of his visions of further future, future beyond the understanding or comprehension of the human mind, beyond death. Macduff’s blade was growing ever nearer as fate knocked on the door and the King to be came towards them, watching like a hawk. Duncan stood beside him, his image blurred and partially disintegrating like a memory long forgotten. Banquo stood beside Duncan and he two looked faded, Macbeth dared not look at him for longer than a second as his blood still dropped as if his wounds were fresh, and his lady stood with her back to him. Even in the blood stained fields, she was still as beautiful as she had been alive. She should have died later.
They had come to greet him, maybe to tell him all the horrible things he had done as he descended into the fiery pits of hell, maybe, just maybe, to be the soothing balm for his hurt mind before the fatal blow and before the endless suffering of damnation.
Macduff’s sword came down.
Searing pain. His head, his face, his arm. It went dark, black without a single star or candle to lighten the endlessness. He felt himself slipping, falling, into the abyss. He felt everything end. Finality, as it were named, seemed more painful than he had once hopped for. Maybe this was God’s way of showing him all the pain he has caused. By injecting it into his body so he had to feel it. He tumbled down. Down into the nothing and felt as if pieces of him began to fade away, like a drop in the larges ocean. The smoke of his life disappearing.
He was dead. He was gone. Pieces of him were decaying and fraying away and yet, he awoke.
The sheets he lay on scratched and irritated his skin, the hay was wet and rotting and it had a pungent smell that mixed with the mold and the spring’s sweet taste. Blood was still in his mouth and he wished to spit it out but his lips were too dry to pull apart. The scars on his cheek that reached up to his forehead seethed with pain anytime he moved a muscle. He couldn’t even attempt to move his arm in fear of the pain that would shoot through him and the scream that would rip from his throat. His head ached. It made him dizzy and nauseous and he wanted nothing more for it to stop. He felt pain.
He felt eyes watching him. He opened his own.
He was alive.