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The Final Day
Dreams of pain. Pushing slowly up. Exhaling. Letting herself slowly down. Exchanging one agony for another. Brief lapses into delirium. The snuffling of wild dogs in the moonlight. She can see one now, at the base of her cross, under the wings of her spread legs. A big male dog. Sniffing at the ground where her pee has soaked in, and her blood. Sniffing at the little pile of excrement that slipped out of her while her tormentors pointed and made faces of disgust. The dog lifts its leg and marks her cross. His territory now. He stands up on his back legs and paws at the wood, snapping hopefully. He can't reach her. And she would make such a nice meal.
But the insects can reach her. Numberless swarms of them, crawling all over her scorched skin, entering her many wounds and dark orifices — vagina, anus, nose, ears, mouth — warm and inviting places that call to them with the aromas of sweat, breath, blood and filth. And she can do nothing but bear it.
She writhes in misery no human being can ever imagine. Until they are nailed to a cross.
Distant snarling wakes her from another dream of pain. Somewhere up the line of crosses dogs are battling over meat. She doesn't want to think about it, but it fills her mind as she struggles upward, exhales, then down. Up. Down. Up. Down.
Please let me die! Please.
But when the sun clears the eastern horizon she is still doing her dance of agony. As is the boy just beyond her. And whoever occupies the last cross she can see before the road bends out of sight.
The buzzards are the first arrivals, eager to fill their bellies with as much of these delicacies as they can before the pesky mobs appear. They've nearly picked old Martianus clean. His skull fell off his torso sometime during the night.
Next come the slaves, a large group from a farm on the other side of the village. Annia recognizes a few of them. It's mutual. They break off eye contact instantly. She can't bear the debasement and shame. They can't bear to look upon her suffering and the wreckage of her body. They are here only because the law demands they learn first hand the temper of Roman justice, lest one of them be tempted to repeat Tollipor's mistake.
The sun is barely a handsbreadth above the tree line when Claudia comes into view, escorted by none other than the Captain. They stop and look up at her.
"Well, there's the little slut," Claudia observes. "She's not so damned sexy now, is she."
"Why do you hate her so?" the Captain asks.
"She thinks she's a gift from the gods, what with her yellow hair and pale skin and perfect figure. She had my husband bewitched. He snuck off with her every chance he got. She wanted to be a concubine so she could fuck him in comfort and eat with our guests. The little whore!"
"She says she's carrying his baby."
Claudia's face darkens. "That wouldn't have gone far. I'd have poked a stick up her cunt myself before I'd let her bear any of my husband's bastards."
"Sounds fiscally irresponsible to me. Why not keep it and sell it? Make some money off her."
"And watch her use it to slip her hook in deeper? Not a chance. I regret only that the little bastard wasn't born so we could crucify it along with her."
"You want us to crucify her baby? Do you hate her that much?"
"She stole my husband's affections. I was willing to put up with a couple of concubines. Everyone knows a man needs a little variety. But when he started to spend the rest of his time with that slut . . . well, no self-respecting wife should have to put up with that!
"And you feel crucifying their baby will right that wrong? Give you peace of mind?"
"Yes! If she has to watch."
"It can be arranged."
"It can?"
"Absolutely. It's not exactly a novel idea. These slave executions frequently involve babies."
"You'd have to get the baby out of her."
"That's right."
"You're saying you're willing to rip the baby out of her belly? Won't that kill her? I want her to suffer at least as long as the rest of them."
"You underestimate my experience, Claudia. You seem to forget that I live by the sword. In my profession I have seen the inside of many human beings, including pregnant women. I have watched and assisted my surgeons at work. I know exactly where to find a woman's womb and how to open it up with minimal damage to the mother. The real question is, why should I do this for you?"
Claudia's eyes brighten, then become sly. "Before I answer that, Captain, may I ask you a question?"
"Certainly."
"Do you find me attractive, in the way of a man with a woman?"
A smile creeps into one corner of his mouth. He touches a finger to her chin and traces a path down her throat to her breastbone, across the blue linen covering her left breast, around the outside of her arm to the center of her back and down the length of her spine, spreading out his hand over her buttocks and drawing her against him. "I think you know the answer to that."
"You must know that Fortunatus has left me a wealthy woman."
"Perhaps so, but you have a great many slaves to replace if you expect to bring in the harvest."
Annia watches Claudia's hand slide under the Captain's tunic and up between his thighs. "Buying slaves and organizing a work force is something a man of your experience can do much better than I can. A strong man, a man with a military background, could double the value of this estate in a few years."
Several moments go by as Claudia makes her point manually.
The Captain inhales sharply, but his expression remains unchanged. "Such a man would require substantial incentive, like half ownership of everything, for example."
"Oh I agree," Claudia breathes in his ear, her hand moving under the tunic.
Finally he smiles. "Fortunately, I happen to have with me the necessary surgical tool." He draws a dagger from his belt and barks a command to the nearby guards. "Soldier! Fetch me a ladder, now!"
A ladder is quickly found and placed against the side of Annia's cross.
Why is she frightened? She wants to die. The baby will die with her anyway. Yet her lips quiver at the sight of the dagger in his hand as he climbs the ladder and leans over her. He touches the point of it to her navel and carves straight down to the top of her slit. She gasps, but what is a little more pain in her present agony? She watches him shove aside the grisly organs she has only seen before in slaughtered animals. New pain flares as he puts his hand around the little sac just above her sex and slices it open. He plucks out a tiny form, red and squirming. She feels the sting of the blade slicing things in her belly, detaching the miniature human who had been growing there. Making no effort to close the wound, he climbs down the ladder and shows his prize to Claudia.
"This fetus is well into the third month. Look, you can even see that it's a girl."
"You can?"
"If it were a boy, you'd see the beginning of a penis right there." He points.
Annia strains to see her child, but can only make out a roughly human shape about half as long as the width of the Captain's hand.
Claudia's face hardens. "Kill it."
"That won't take much. It will be dead within moments anyway."
"You promised to crucify it!"
He laughs. "Form over substance. I understand. That's the whole point of crucifixion, is it not? To make a point. Not to the crucified, but to those who follow."
As he talks he produces a nail from his belt pack, holds the fetus against the upright of the cross and pounds the nail through it into the wood with the flat of his sword.
Annia wails from where she is nailed above her murdered baby, her blood dripping on to its corpse from the slash in her belly.
"So what are we going to do with all these bodies?" Claudia is asking the Captain. "The dead ones are already stinking up the place. Can we bury them?"
"Absolutely not!" he replies. "The law requires they remain nailed up until they rot. Just stay in the house, or take a vacation. Only the new slaves will have to endure it and the lesson will be good for them. Actually those birds up there will eat a lot of them. When their bodies begin to crumble and fall off the crosses, we can toss them into the pit behind the pig barn and cover them with layers of pig and sheep dung. They'll make good compost."
They continue to discuss their future plans as they stroll out of earshot.
She wants to be dead, but she isn't. Her body is demanding to exhale again. It's pushing her up on the nails in her heels. She strains through the blossoming pain, her intestines begining to bulge out through the gaping wound in her belly. The vultures overhead take note.
Why did he do it? Why was he so hateful to her? She had done her best to please him in her Master's bed. Even if he couldn't spare her this horror of an execution, he might have shown her just a little compassion in carrying it out. The tiniest amount of lenience. Why did he volunteer to kill her little baby? Her little girl?
Gradually she realizes she's too weak to rise up off the crotch nail. She keens in her effort to exhale. She drops her head in utter despair. Now the vultures will make a feast of her, tearing into her open belly to feed on her organs as the flies are now doing. By evening she will be full of maggots. She watches the blood welling up inside her and spilling out. The gold fleece above her desecrated sex is red with it, collecting the flow before it drains down her legs, past the nail through her heels and finally down the post and over the tiny corpse nailed there.
She thinks about what the Captain was saying about the law. She understands now that the cruelest part of crucifixion is not that one is put to death. Everyone dies. It's not even the endless agony, terrible as that is. The cruelest part is the knowledge of what comes after death: that the body will be left to carrion eaters, or tossed into a dung heap. That is the ultimate disgrace. The ultimate injustice. The ultimate pain.
She thinks about her dead baby. She wonders if it might not have suffered the same fate when she revealed her pregnancy to her Master. Rufa had once confided that she had become pregnant by him, and that he had made Plautilla, the household mid-wife, abort her with a stick. He said he didn't want to be deprived of the services of his favorite concubine or take the chance that she'd lose her spectacular figure. Would he have done the same to Annia?
The carrion birds are circling lower.
She tries again to raise herself, but cannot. She's strangling, struggling to exhale. Her arms and legs are numb, her vision blurred. The nails begin to feel distant. The crowds of sightseers are blurring. Some throw rocks, aiming at the gory opening in her belly. A rock rips into the wound and a segment of intestine falls out. Some boys cheer. A torrent of blood streams from the bottom of the incision and through the cleft of her sex, spattering off her heels. But she feels nothing.
Suddenly she understands. She had misunderstood the Captain. In his crafty way he has granted her prayers.
A rock hits her eye, blinding it. But it doesn't matter. There's nothing left to look at. She will rot on this cross, be eaten by vultures, and what's left will be thrown in the dung pit behind the pig sty.
But none of it matters any more. The pain is fading quickly. The suffering is over.
Her heart is doing desperate things. Stuttering. Struggling. But there's too little blood. Movement is impossible. She can't breathe.
The world sparkles in a gathering darkness.
Sounds swirl inward to a pinpoint.
Silence.
Now there's only the soft smell of hay, waiting to be harvested.
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