Willowfall Captured (6), by Hangnail
We got up at sunrise. After we ate I went and opened up the storeroom.
Willowfall had torn the canvas bags in to strips. Perhaps she'd been planning
to strangle herself somehow.
"Please, I want to die like a soldier," she told me.
"Don't worry, you'll be fine." I said.
"I don't want to die like a slave. Not crucified in front of everyone."
"Don't worry, it won't hurt too much: these guys know what they're doing,"
I said. She didn't seem to appreciate the joke.
She went on complaining about the day's planned activities as I tied together
the two short cords that were still attached to the hooks in her nipples, and
tied another cord to them, like a leash. One jerk on the leash and she
followed me attentively.
When we got outside, the activity of the day was just beginning. Men were
scarce, of course, but there were women out in the streets doing morning
errands. Willowfall was taken aback and looked down, embarrassed at her
near-nakedness. Her dress was all torn up and showed her body every time the
wind blew. We'd emptied the outpost and I told Gallus he'd be pulling the
small cart on to which he and Silvanus had already loaded all our stuff,
including Sextus's weapons and armor. Gallus was not happy but knew better
than to disobey a direct order. Willowfall asked to be allowed to carry her
bow. She wanted to look like a captured warrior. I told her we'd lost it. Then
we set off, leading her by her leash. People stared at her, some seeming
curious and others tightening their lips in sympathy. Willowfall tried to
carry herself with as much dignity as she could muster.
The forum was bustling with people. Many were citizens with stuff they'd
salvaged or stolen from their own sacked city, desperate to barter it for
food. There were also legionnaires eager to take the second-hand loot,
offering excess army food rations in exchange. There didn't seem to be a
Tribune or anyone who could officially pass judgement on Willowfall. Gallus
waited with the cart while Silvanus and I draggged her around the place like a
dog. She tried to ignore the crowd and kept her hands crossed over her
chest. Some jovial sappers offered to exchange her for a head of cabbage, and
when we turned them down they offered to throw in a dead rat. Willowfall
glared at them. Finally we found a quartermaster and asked him about
procedure.
"Do it yourself," he growled. "You need timber and nails, just take 'em from
the siege wall."
Willowfall looked stunned. She'd been expecting a trial where she could
stand up and publicly defy the Romans, then to be led, head held high, to a
martyr's death before an admiring populace.
We rejoined Gallus, since he'd have to take the cart out to the main camp
anyway, and together walked along the street to the city gate. Willowfall
resisted, pulling on the leash and refusing to walk. She demanded to be taken
to the Praefectus to plead her case. Silvanus tied her hands behind her back
and we dragged her by the nipple-leash. Outside the gate loitered the dregs of
the population: beggars, tinkers, and prostitutes. The siege wall,
already partly dismantled, stood a hundred yards ahead. There were bodies
still nailed to it, whole families of escaping citizens who had been captured
during the siege. There were a few low crosses along the road where we were,
near the city wall. Bloody, naked bodies of men hung motionless on the first
few, but there were two more, another fifty feet ahead and about ten feet off
on the right side of the road, that were almost lost amongst a dense crowd.
We came along the road next to them, but they were crux humilis and you could
only just see the twitching hands nailed to each crossbeam visible above the
heads of the crowd.
There was no guard detail, so we decided to take that role. Gallus tethered
Willowfall to the cart and we moved in to the crowd, shouting and brandishing
our swords. The motley group moved reluctantly back, and the two victims came
in to view. They were a man and a woman, probably nailed up within the last
hour. They were active on their crosses, struggling from position to position,
with moans and gasps and the occasional loud cry. The sign lashed to the
man's cross said "Thief". The woman's said "Whore". She had black hair that
formed a mass of springy curls about her tear-streaked face. Her skin was
pale. Her thick legs were bent at the knee and her solid behind rested against
the stipes. Her breasts were big and white, with large pink areolas. They
swung invitingly as she twisted from side to side. The black nailheads stood
out on her white wrists, and her feet had been nailed side by side to the top
of a thick segment of tree trunk that lay on its side at the foot of her
cross. Her pubic area was plucked and her labia were visible. The man was
older with grey stubble on his face, also very pale apart from his face and
forearms. He had been fixed in a similar fashion, except that his feet had
been nailed through the heels to the sides of the stipes.
They noticed that the crowd, which had been tormenting them with unsympathetic
words and physical abuse, had moved away. Both were down in the low-hanging
position, their knees sticking out in front. When they saw us, their
inarticulate howling and sobbing gave way to pleading with us to let them
down. When they realized we were only here with another victim to join them,
the man began cursing us, but the woman kept begging. Her pleas grew louder
and more shrill. Her hair bounced around her pain-twisted face. She looked up
at the nailheads sticking out of her wrists. She had been hanging low for
long enough that the pain in her arms and wrists was becoming unbearable. I
glanced across at Willowfall. She stood motionless, her eyes wide with horror,
fixed on the woman. All of us stared, entranced, as the woman's leg muscles
tightened, and she began to push upwards. Blood dribbled from the nails in her
feet as she bore down on them. The log rolled a little, and her feet
were rotated from the top to the front, so she found herself being pushed
outwards rather than upwards by her efforts. As drops of blood fell from
her toes to the ground, her thick legs quivered, and with a great cry
of despair she slumped back again to the low-hanging position.
"What about here, then?" I asked Willowfall, pointing at the space between
the two crosses. "You'd have these two to talk to when the crowd goes away. Or
if you want your own space you could be on the other side of the road."
"No," croaked Willowfall. Her hands were shaking, and the color had drained
from her face.
There was a stack of timbers behind the man's cross that had been brought
from the siege wall by whoever assembled the crosses for the man and woman.
I pulled Willowfall forward. She looked first at the woman, who was
shaking her head and keening through clenched teeth, then at the man, who
was just beginning to stir as the agony of his stretched arms increased
to match that of his impaled feet.
"Look," I tried to get her to look at the pile of lumber. "One
of those thick pieces could be your stipes."
One of them was 8 feet long, so when buried in the ground it would make a
crux humilis, low like the other two. The other was a good 12 feet and would
put Willowfall's hips at about head height.
"Well, do you want to be above the crowd?" I asked, solicitously.
She looked around wildly. "I'm not a common criminal!" she shouted
with hysterical force that quieted the chattering onlookers. "I fought
the Romans! We fought to save our city!"
There was silence in the crowd. They could tell from her speech that
she was from the city's more prosperous classes, the merchants and rulers who
had resisted the Romans because they had most to lose. The men surveyed
her well-toned body. Many of them had lusted hopelessly after high-class
women like Willowfall.
"Please!" she cried out, "Don't let them nail me up here with a thief
and a prostitute!"
"What's wrong with being a prostitute?" shouted one of the women in the
crowd.
Silvanus and Gallus got out shovels from our cart. I picked out two of the
stronger-looking men and told them to dig a three foot hole for the stipes
between the two existing crosses. I poked around in the pile for something
strong enough to make a crossbeam, with a flat edge somewhere near the middle
where it could be fitted to the upright. Silvanus looked for any reusable
nails embedded in the lumber, and pried them out using a crowbar.
Willowfall, meanwhile, was not winning over the crowd.
"Look what the Romans are doing to us!" she pleaded. "I fought back and
they tortured me!"
"What did they do, take away your silk bedsheets?" shouted one of the
prostitutes. She had a large round body but with no breasts to speak of.
Her eyes were crudely lined with kohl.
"What do you *think* they did?" retorted Willowfall, angrily.
"Looks like they used your tits for fish-bait!" called a man at the back,
"Not that they'd catch much!"
The taunting of Willowfall went on while the two men from the crowd dug a
hole in the ground between the two occupied crosses. The crucified man was
unable to hide his pain and desperation. In between cries of anguish he was
able, his voice shaking with agony, to plead with Silvanus to take the nails
from his heels. It must have been particularly galling to him that his toes
were just inches from the ground, so he could easily have planted his feet
firmly on the earth at the base of his stipes if they hadn't been nailed to
the sides of it. Silvanus laughed and offered to use the crowbar to break his
legs. The man cursed him and writhed with pain and frustration, causing
himself even more torture, then accepted Silvanus's offer. Silvanus just waved
him off like an annoying beggar.
I went back to Willowfall, and untied her hands, keeping a firm grip
on her wrists. Her fear, amplified by the sadistic excitement of the crowd,
brought out a sheen of sweat over her whole body, and I found myself
excited by the feral smell of her.
"Please!" she said to me, louder than she had intended, "not here with
these low-lifes. Take me back to..."
"Low-lifes?" hollered a wasted beggar whose stained tunic could not conceal
his bulging enjoyment of the cruel spectacle. He posed before the crowd. "She
called us 'low-lifes'!"
A chorus of booing and jeering filled the air, and grew in to a ringing
chant.
"Hang her low! Make it slow! Hang her low! Make it slow!"
Willowfall struggled in my grip as Silvanus came over to us, dragging a
plank that would make a thin but serviceable patibulum. The two diggers were
still working, but with the crowd in such a mood there was no need to wait.
Then a few voices started a new refrain, which gathered force until it
was as loud as the first.
"Hang her high! Make her cry! Hang her high! Make her cry!".
Laundry scrubbers and prostitutes cheerfully elbowed each other and tried to
out-shout each other as the two factions competed to carry the day. A tinker
banged his pots and kitchen utensils together in support of the "hang her
high" side; a pair of derelict beggars so ancient that I couldn't tell if they
were male or female opened their toothless mouths in croaking support of
hanging her low. Willowfall looked devastated. I let the battle rage for a
minute and then raised my sword in a commanding gesture. The chanting slowly
died away.
"Citizens!" I said. There was laughter at this high form of address.
"Good people," I went on, "It is time for you do do something the masters
of this city never let you do before. Vote!"
A roar of approval greeted this suggestion.