Thanks to all for the good wishes! It has been a trying time. Now we've got this unaccustomed arctic cold coming, expecting temperatures we haven't seen in up to 70 years. Oh well, this too shall pass.
In the meantime, I've managed to complete one more scene and run 36 renders. I'll try to pick out the top ten and post those here. In this scene, Sabina stares for a moment at the nail in her right wrist. After a brief struggle, Ajax has pulled her ankles together and is roping them tightly. The onlookers watch, some smiling, some perhaps a little sympathetic. In a moment, the executioner will drive nails through each of her feet. Sabina narrates this part:
Ajax laughed at me like I was a fool. I had been sentenced to the cross, and that meant nailing my feet. He ordered me to be still. The memory of Hercules’ finger probing inside of me reminded me that they could hurt me, do anything they wanted to me if I resisted. I took a deep breath, my body trembling, closed my eyes and tried to force myself to stop struggling.
I didn’t want them to hurt me anymore, didn’t want to endure having my feet nailed to the cross! But I couldn’t keep hanging by my wrists, either, the pain getting worse moment by moment. I didn’t have any choice, but then it wasn’t up to me anyway.
The crowd had moved in closer now that I was hanging on the cross, everyone trying to get a better look at the naked, suffering slave girl. As I drew in one gasping breath after another, fighting back my panic, the agony in my wrists, my burning shoulders, I could hear them mocking me and laughing.
I was sobbing, trembling in terror, pain and humiliation. I felt, rather than saw, as Ajax pulled my ankles together, arranged them side by side and wound the rope around them. He wrapped it between my ankles and pull it down tight, not bothering to knot it. It would only have to secure my feet for a few moments.
The agony of the nails, of what they did to me when they nailed my wrists to the cross, was so intense, so excruciating! It almost made me faint. In a few moments they were going to do the same thing to my feet, drive iron spikes through them, blow by blow, between the bones, impale them and fix them permanently to the timber of the cross!
I was panicking, ready to scream, but what good would it do? No one cared! These people watching had come to hear me scream, watch me twist in agony. No matter what I did, in a few moments they were going to drive those spikes through each one of my feet, one after the other, one blow at a time.