The injustice is to have him blinded by wine alone. Surely the widow’s beauty, so profoundly attested to, played its part in the stripping of his buckler and his greaves, the dispatched barefoot servants bearing his dented breastplate away.
It sings that he spied her, through the smoke and torment, pure in her fur-lined purple hood, a staring ivory face, eyes of impacted gazelle, ripened on a wife’s experience. Surely she was beautiful when she swept into his tent, with only hindsight able to detect a furtiveness as she ducked her head free of the light. Her white face, the bedding of scooped-out plum, provocative to his mind’s blaze. And here, perhaps, is where his drunkenness sealed off desire from caution, where arrogance (that such a woman would slip towards him, arrayed in the colors and shape, the simulacrum of pleasure) dismissed its sad lieutenant, dour suspicion.
The gold pins which bound her hair shone like dull suns upon his scaled eyes. When she opened her robe he could smell her, and in smelling he could almost taste her on his tongue. Delicious as sacrilege and seaside exotic, a dark-breezed garden to mist his beard, cataract his nostrils. The nameless authors draw a curtain before our eyes, we can only surmise that love of country bared her breasts and parted her knees and granted him three candles’ time from wick to lump, hive-busy access in her blood-blushed sheath, groaning a duet even as she figured the airy hinges of her plot.
Her maid’s assistance serviced in the rolling of his snoring bulk, a wax-pearled brand brought low and close to expose his passion-spattered throat. And then his sword, still grimed with Israelite blood, two-handed above her unpinned love-wild hair till the blade sparked the soles of her hissing urgent god. And fell its single lopping blow, his curl-burdened head bouncing like a child’s toy, his trunk a shudder of wrecked surprise, ending in a rose-red fountain.