Every Shadow Burns My Face

[malins]

There she'd seen something, and read about it then, that hadn't been done in the North anymore in her lifetime, not since the Second Edicts anyway. That was what they used to do with fallen women; they'd tie them upside down dangling from a tree, legs apart, hand behind their back, hair dangling down, and for the day anyone could come and do anything with them, as long as it went by the rules. Only by nightfall could she be taken down. And the first rule was of course not to have her dead before dusk, though breaking her limbs, branding her, whatever, would be fine. And another was that if the girl stopped screaming any man could start counting and if he could count properly to thirty before she started screaming again then it would be his turn. And so it would go all day long with the men all taking turns, pummeling and pounding and beating and breaking, and just one girl taking it all. Usually what was left at dusk was just a barely-breathing bag of broken bones. If she died before it would be black luck for the village so they took care she didn't.

But sometimes, very very rarely, it was told that it came out different, when pretty much the whole village knew the poor girl had been set up by some fiend. Then there would be good men who'd come out and whip her just that way that she'd always be screaming but wouldn't be all shredded to bloody bits. And they'd make sure no-one got in between who had anything else in mind and so in the evening she'd be all hoarse and red and striped but not anywhere near really dying.

In the good stories she'd then always be revealed to be innocent and she'd marry the nice strong boy who'd made her scream most with the whip.

Those were fairy-tales of course.

The Second Edicts, or what people usually just called Reform, had done away with that kind of punishment, because they said for any crime the retribution must be precise and proclaimed in advance. That didn't always mean it was better. If you proclaimed the exact punishment was going to be breaking on the wheel, with every blow described, that was all fine with Reform. It might be twenty lashes too. But what Reform couldn't stand was whims, just giving people over to mobs to have anything at all done to them.

Anyone who knew the Lady of course understood that she scoffed at the Second Edicts: they got in the way of her whims.

What the fairytale though told of, was how the girl got saved by the people who kept her screaming with their whips.

And that was what the whipmasters of the Order had always done, riding out quick when such a punishment was happening, and seeing to it that the girl lived, and could be taken down, and into the monastery, and purified.

Most of the Sisters who'd joined before the time of Reform, they were old now, they'd come in like that. The Middlelands had taken up Reform too, and nowadays that wasn't really happening anymore, but the whipmasters kept up their craft and their practice.

 

[Barbaria1]

There she'd seen something, and read about it then, that hadn't been done in the North anymore in her lifetime, not since the Second Edicts anyway. That was what they used to do with fallen women; they'd tie them upside down dangling from a tree, legs apart, hand behind their back, hair dangling down, and for the day anyone could come and do anything with them, as long as it went by the rules. Only by nightfall could she be taken down. And the first rule was of course not to have her dead before dusk, though breaking her limbs, branding her, whatever, would be fine. And another was that if the girl stopped screaming any man could start counting and if he could count properly to thirty before she started screaming again then it would be his turn. And so it would go all day long with the men all taking turns, pummeling and pounding and beating and breaking, and just one girl taking it all. Usually what was left at dusk was just a barely-breathing bag of broken bones. If she died before it would be black luck for the village so they took care she didn't.

But sometimes, very very rarely, it was told that it came out different, when pretty much the whole village knew the poor girl had been set up by some fiend. Then there would be good men who'd come out and whip her just that way that she'd always be screaming but wouldn't be all shredded to bloody bits. And they'd make sure no-one got in between who had anything else in mind and so in the evening she'd be all hoarse and red and striped but not anywhere near really dying.

In the good stories she'd then always be revealed to be innocent and she'd marry the nice strong boy who'd made her scream most with the whip.

Those were fairy-tales of course.

The Second Edicts, or what people usually just called Reform, had done away with that kind of punishment, because they said for any crime the retribution must be precise and proclaimed in advance. That didn't always mean it was better. If you proclaimed the exact punishment was going to be breaking on the wheel, with every blow described, that was all fine with Reform. It might be twenty lashes too. But what Reform couldn't stand was whims, just giving people over to mobs to have anything at all done to them.

Anyone who knew the Lady of course understood that she scoffed at the Second Edicts: they got in the way of her whims.

What the fairytale though told of, was how the girl got saved by the people who kept her screaming with their whips.

And that was what the whipmasters of the Order had always done, riding out quick when such a punishment was happening, and seeing to it that the girl lived, and could be taken down, and into the monastery, and purified.

Most of the Sisters who'd joined before the time of Reform, they were old now, they'd come in like that. The Middlelands had taken up Reform too, and nowadays that wasn't really happening anymore, but the whipmasters kept up their craft and their practice.

Well that is certainly good incentive for the men to learn how to count to at least 30!

No, the Reform doesn't sound like a big improvement, although maybe so for those who don't like surprises

 

[malins]

Reform doesn't sound like a big improvement

Anyway on the weekend I looked at a real castle. Started in 1200's and converted to a chateau in the 18th century. It was interesting to see that the 1400's dungeon had a separate heating installation for the benefit of the prisoners, and daylight coming in through two windows. In the late 1700's it's completely lightless, no more heating, literally a rot-pit that people were lowered into on ropes through a hole in the ceiling. So much of "late medieval" vs. "Age of Enlightenment"... definitely a disimprovement.

 

[malins]

what they used to do with fallen women; they'd tie them upside down dangling from a tree, legs apart, hand behind their back, hair dangling down

What Mirasintsa describes here is perhaps something like what Brother Baurong put to paper during his travels.

 

[malins]

incentive for the men to learn how to count to at least 30!

Mirasintsa will have something to say about that too - not all of them can, and it's a way the "rules" weed out the most dimwitted drooling savages

 

[malins]

Reading that book in the tent, and taking that picture into her mind because somehow it wouldn't let go, Mirasintsa couldn't have guessed that this was exactly what would happen with her, when she was on the way to get up North from Peak Gaunabant.

They'd confronted her and asked her some questions and noticed her accent and she'd given stupid answers and they'd worked out she was 'maidservant to the Mad Queen', as they said, and that was the second best thing for them to get their hands on other than the Lady herself, who had removed herself from any possible grasp.

And they'd decided to give her the punishment of old.

A while after they'd started on her, one of them had found the thing in the heap of her discarded clothes, Tsilsne's slender blade, and wanted to use it on her, and got in line, and it was a horror having to wait for that while the first one was still busy with the brambles on her. But the man who'd found the knife had been a brute who couldn't count past twenty when she'd stopped screaming and so the next one in line after him had his turn. And he'd been a Brother of the Whip, here from the Order.

Mirasintsa had not ever stopped screaming again that day.

Her voice took much longer to come back than the stripes to disappear.

But so, none of the other brutes had laid hand on her.

And while she couldn't have guessed of this while looking at the book (which she had done often), she'd never forget the feeling of it for the rest of her life, and so she understood about the whipping.

 

[RacingRodent]

Excellent world building and interesting back story for Mirasinta

Loving this tale. It has such a sense of rich depth and breathing history to it.

 

[malins]

So as she sat there on her cot with the cilice around her thigh but otherwise still naked, the memories were going through her head.

She decided, that just like when she had leafed through the heavy pages of 'On the Methods of Justice…' and pondered for each illustration whether it was good or bad – whether she would have liked to be there or not – she would continue to leaf through the pages of her memories, and weigh which of them were confessions that needed to come out and which weren't.

Questions asked and questions unasked.

She had been better at confessing with the Lady.

She'd learned a way of reckless confession with her, because when you spilled out your heart, when you gave yourself up right away, when you were helpless, the Lady was always kind and understanding and forgiving, but when you gave her reason to suspect, when you gave her cause to ponder your punishment, when you evaded her – then her heart would harden and she could be as tough as anyone.
It seemed she didn't like you keeping your secrets although she kept so many.

So of course they asked a lot of questions about the end, the pyre and so forth, and about the war.
Mirasintsa didn't like thinking about the pyre although she often had to. She didn't know very much about the war itself.

She remembered when the General was checking some calculations about where the gold was going from the Lady Tsilsne's war chest, and he looked up at her and said something like,

“This is what happens when you put a woman in charge of equipping an army, she goes and spends it all on shoes!”.

They both laughed then.
The Lady had said that the shoes might decide the war.
Some time after that the soldiers started singing a new song, 'These boots are made for marching'.
So she told them that and they nodded knowingly and wrote it down.

 

[Barbaria1]

So as she sat there on her cot with the cilice around her thigh but otherwise still naked, the memories were going through her head.

She decided, that just like when she had leafed through the heavy pages of 'On the Methods of Justice…' and pondered for each illustration whether it was good or bad – whether she would have liked to be there or not – she would continue to leaf through the pages of her memories, and weigh which of them were confessions that needed to come out and which weren't.

Questions asked and questions unasked.

She had been better at confessing with the Lady.

She'd learned a way of reckless confession with her, because when you spilled out your heart, when you gave yourself up right away, when you were helpless, the Lady was always kind and understanding and forgiving, but when you gave her reason to suspect, when you gave her cause to ponder your punishment, when you evaded her – then her heart would harden and she could be as tough as anyone.
It seemed she didn't like you keeping your secrets although she kept so many.

So of course they asked a lot of questions about the end, the pyre and so forth, and about the war.
Mirasintsa didn't like thinking about the pyre although she often had to. She didn't know very much about the war itself.

She remembered when the General was checking some calculations about where the gold was going from the Lady Tsilsne's war chest, and he looked up at her and said something like,

“This is what happens when you put a woman in charge of equipping an army, she goes and spends it all on shoes!”.

They both laughed then.
The Lady had said that the shoes might decide the war.
Some time after that the soldiers started singing a new song, 'These boots are made for marching'.
So she told them that and they nodded knowingly and wrote it down.

"these boots are made for marching" makes me think of Nancy Sinatra, which is way off the story line here

... more important to think about the "pyre".

 

[Primus pilus]

So as she sat there on her cot with the cilice around her thigh but otherwise still naked, the memories were going through her head.

Wonderfully woven Malin with so much detail. Even down to the cilice that, assuming it is appropriately and sharply spiked, must abrade her otherwise naked thigh as a constant reminder.
One wonders whether Opus Dei and their delight at 2 hours of the cilice each day learned something from these writings.

But Pp, being a simple man, must write Himself some notes to keep track as you build these characters.

 

[malins]

"these boots are made for marching" makes me think of Nancy Sinatra, which is way off the story line here

It's a different context but the connection is obvious - there has to be a little humor, it can't all be people drowning in blood...

more important to think about the "pyre"

not yet....

Opus Dei

I think I'm making a bit of fun of them. They also have this idea that women's passions need more taming by mortification than men's. Opus Dei would run to the hills though seeing the rituals of the Order. The girls who 'progress' are the ones who take the whipping well, naked, in front of both men and women, and ahum, they say the purpose is to have the 'sin flowing out of them' Actually believing the Doctrine seems to be of less importance. At least when these girls get 'married to the Church' the Church does something for them

Pp, being a simple man, must write Himself some notes to keep track

An m. is worried. Is Pp getting ... impatient? even angry...?

 

[RacingRodent]

An m. is worried. Is Pp getting ... impatient? even angry...?

Nah it is just PP is preparing for when Every Shadow Burns My Face becomes an HBO hit series and the other guy at the conventions will say "Well I read the book" he'll be be ready to point out he was there when you first wrote the first draught online

 

[malins]

“This is what happens when you put a woman in charge of equipping an army, she goes and spends it all on shoes”. - They'd both laughed then.

The boots really were important though. And the singing and the drums and pipes. That way the soldiers actually loved the marching and they came up with a lot of their own songs too. The main force was all footmen but the Lady loved it when she could show up with her army much farther and faster than the other side expected, and the men weren't even footsore. That was because of the boots of course, made for marching.

About the General there was something she didn't say because they didn't ask.

Everyone pretty much knew that before he went mercenary, General Stadmar had led a fruitless fight to hold the northernmost provinces of the Gabardine Empire before they'd given up altogether on that land. You couldn't really call him a deserter because the Empire had deserted him first, left him out there. And they'd deserted all of the responsibilities and privileges the Empire used to have in the Middlelands too. Because they'd been busy fighting off the Sultitan Behemothep but doing it all wrong, the General said when he talked of that time, and so the new Emperor who came in after they'd chopped up Bufops and thrown him into the river had to draw together all the legions he could get.

All of that had been just around or before the time she'd been born so she had no memory of that but it had been the last time there'd been war all over, the North got in it too, that was the Wars of Dissolution. Finished about twenty years ago. All of that was in a book too by now.

What many also knew was that the General had taken a grave wound fighting with bog-devils, as he called them, in the provinces.

What but a few had seen was where the scar was, low on his abdomen.

A rumor had started to spread, that ever since then, he hadn't been able to do it anymore. People had started calling him the Eunuch General behind his back.

Of course he knew but surprisingly he didn't seem to mind.
He'd calmly pointed out that 'the most feared and most successful generals in the last three hundred years of the Empire had been eunuchs'. They made good generals because the memory of their feats in war would be all they had to pass on, they wouldn't try to found their own dynasties, and they weren't distracted.

With the General in the Lady Tsilsne's tent so often, it was best for all if he was a eunuch.

After the death of the infant prince, when the Lady couldn't by rights call herself Regent Queen of Belquemer anymore, but the crowd in Iannistraie crowned her queen of something anyway, they didn't really care, it was just a crowd demanding a queen - then it all got a bit difficult.

Most people sort of said that her husband, her King – that was the War, or Righteousness, or something like that.
It wouldn't do good to have a real man in her tent. People would ask who was the real leader. People would consider her either second to him, or a wanton.
It was better to see her as a celibate committed to a cause, so a eunuch was just right. Kept her pure, and maybe at the same time kept the common soldiers dreaming that for some hero's deed in battle they'd be led to the tent for a secret night with her, since after all there wasn't a real man there but she might need one that no-one would ever know about. There were all sorts of rumors!

Except of course if you served in the tent you knew perfectly well he was able.

So that was a false rumor. And they'd known it was going round but it was useful.

The Brothers hadn't asked of such things and she hadn't told.
Probably because some of the ways she'd served in the tent, when she served the General, or the Lady and the General both at the same time, had a lot to do with sin, or so they would say.

So she tightened the cilice for that.
For not telling, not so much for what they'd call sin.

 

[Primus pilus]

An m. is worried. Is Pp getting ... impatient? even angry...?

An m might tighten her own cilice as a nagging reminder of what an angry Pp might be

Nah it is just PP is preparing for when Every Shadow Burns My Face becomes an HBO hit series

Let's use that reason anyway RR . Keep Malin off guard shall we?

 

[malins]

Let's use that reason anyway RR . Keep Malin off guard shall we?

Ganging up on me? Not fair! ahumm, who said it would be fair...

 

[malins]

What she did tell them though was that in the tent she had insisted they just called her the Lady, not Queen, but outside the tent, when some king challenged her right to call herself Queen, she'd send her army marching against him to try and get his head. That was true.

What the Brothers did ask a lot about was witchcraft.

Again she'd told them truly, that there weren't any spells cast or sacrifices or cauldrons or night-flights or books with unreadable letters that crawled over the pages or any such things. There were a lot of books that were hard to read but that was mostly because it was all about the history of the Gabardine legions or such. And poetry and legends and fairy-tales, and books like 'On the Methods of Justice…' or 'Thirteen True Tales of Travels to Distant Lands'. Those were easier.

Just like with the confessions, when you had some kind of doubt or question, it was always best to go right up to the Lady and ask her.

So the truth was, Mirasintsa had done that and gone up to her and asked whether she secretly really was a witch, as so many people said.

The Lady had made that sort of “I knew this was coming” sigh and motioned for her to sit down and sat down too.

She said then that of course all that stuff about frogging knights and hop-croak-quack (she made the noises and wrinkled her nose) and then knighting the frogs again, that was nonsense. Hogwash. In witchcraft you'd see a lot of herbs and tinctures and dancing naked and singing and some more - but mostly words.

You shouldn't underestimate the words, she'd said.
Just think of what people would do because of a poem or a song or a story if it was the right one at the right time.

When war was brewing – you could have people who were angry but didn't know what to do about it, people who wanted to fight but didn't know whom, you gave them the right words and the next day you had an army.

If you were just so-so good with the words then you'd need riders who went out with big scrolls to the town squares and recite the words out loud with some fanfares to announce and that's what lords and counts and kings often did. Or you could carve your words on a plate and press them out ten-thousand times on paper and spread them secretly like rebels or heretics sometimes did.

If you were better with the words, you might stroll through a town that was just about to go to sleep.
You'd send whispers floating in through their windows to sink into their dreams.
The very next day, they would get up knowing things they hadn't known the day before.
Or thinking they knew those things.

If you were really good - you'd put your whispers on the wind and they'd grow wings and go where they needed to.
If you had it down pat then sometimes you could sort of twist your eyes and look behind the curtains of the world and just think your words really hard at the world and something behind those curtains would shift. And the world would change.

Not like knights turning to frogs, but people acting differently, because something had grown in their imagination.

And somewhere in between the whispers and the thoughts was where witchcraft began, and really it was a gift, like having perfect pitch, you needed to train it, but all the balderdash around it was just warming up and setting the mood, so you'd get in tune, find the balance, the point where you could tip the scales with just a breath or a whisper or a thought. But really it was just the other side of the coin of what you'd call leadership anyway, because leadership was a lot about getting people to do what you want but it never was about forcing every single one of them to do it, you needed to get them to think it was good for themselves or the right thing to do or it was their duty or it just followed naturally from what they'd done before and such – even if that wasn't what it was. Even if it was your will they were doing, as their own.

And she said a man like the General had learned all his life to get men to do that by having authority and strength and standing up front and giving orders and commands. But that was different from what a Lady might have learned. Although they were busy learning from each other now. That kind of learning, that's one reason why we keep winning, she'd said.

With both ways of doing though, what she said, it could be like rolling a snowball down a slope, you didn't know before how big it would get, where exactly it would go or whether it would just break up or come to a stop before going very far at all.

She paused then and added that if they put the red irons on her like the Truthfinders had, they'd find she could do a little of the whispers but not much more.

And the Lady said she really didn't like the taste of spider-jelly and batwing soup especially when the membranes stuck to your palate, that was yuck. So it ended with a laugh and it wasn't a straightforward answer like Yes or No, but the not-straightforward answers from the Lady were usually the ones where you learned the most. And when she ended her talking with a silly little joke you always knew that whatever she'd said before was absolutely dead serious.

So that was what the Lady Tsilsne had said all about being a witch or not.

Mirasintsa remembered what the Lady had said about once having killed a man without touching him and thought that maybe the Lady wasn't admitting to all she could do. Sometimes she would say she wasn't all that good at something where you knew she was. That thought however was one of the few she didn't confess to the Lady.

Mirasintsa had left everything out about the whispers and the thoughts when she answered the Brother's questions about witchcraft and only answered all of their questions with 'No' of what she might have seen, that she hadn't seen it, which was true, but she'd been concealing.

So she tightened the cilice for that.
And for a thought she hadn't confessed to the Lady.

 

[Primus pilus]

So she tightened the cilice for that.
And for a thought she hadn't confessed to the Lady.

And what other thoughts has this m failed to confess? Will she tighten that cilice even more as Pp reads?

 

[RacingRodent]

And what other thoughts has this m failed to confess? Will she tighten that cilice even more as Pp reads?

Well she has to stop at some point before her leg comes off

 

[Primus pilus]

Ganging up on me? Not fair! ahumm, who said it would be fair...

Yet elsewhere she would hope and pray that Roland and Pilus are very much in league and might yet bring rescue . Swings and roundabouts. Fair and unfair .

 

[malins]

And what other thoughts has this m failed to confess? Will she tighten that cilice even more as Pp reads?

that one - 'having served the Lady for near eight years' I would guess a lot.

Well she has to stop at some point before her leg comes off

It's not that bad yet, but the thought will visit her that she shouldn't be overdoing it

Yet elsewhere she would hope and pray that Roland and Pilus are very much in league and might yet bring rescue . Swings and roundabouts. Fair and unfair .

That's how it goes. Mirasintsa in this story has already had a rather interesting rescue However the characters in this story are really just that, characters. There is no relation between Mirasintsa and a certain m. and there's no connection between the General and a certain Soldier. Anyway Mirasintsa is getting a lot of attention right now, that's because she must know a lot but not everything. There'll be more from her but not everything she remembers will require a confession or a mortification. Not today though. I think there's a place in a dimly lit room in another world to go visit before this can continue.