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Reflections of a Crucified Man

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Aedile

Aedile

Magistrate
Instead of just commenting on everyone’s posts, I figured it was time to contribute a story to the forum. I’m not a visual artist in any way, but I can write a little bit. I don’t usually fantasize about myself being crucified, but I found the character of a smalltime thief who finds himself crucified to be compelling.

Anyway, here’s the first part of my story. The next installment should come soon.

—————————

I pressed my ass against the wooden post of my cross.

It was hot for a Spring morning in Thrace. Just my luck to be crucified on a cloudless, windless day.

A cramp seized my legs, and I gasped, forgetting about the non-cooperative weather. I threw my chest out farther away from the cross and willed myself to push my ass harder against the post. If I could just get all of my weight there, maybe the crushing pain in my wrists and feet would relent.

The upright post of my cross was barely more than a tree trunk sheared of its branches. It was rough and coarse and pricked my back every time I threw my head back from pain, frustration, or just the need to breathe. The one exception was right where my ass now rested. The wood there, about half the way up the post of this short cross, was smooth and shiny. Apparently, my predecessors on this cross all had the same idea.

I would help make the wood even smoother before I died.

I found a position I could hold with just a little bit of effort in my legs. I may have just entered my fifth decade of life, but I was still strong! My belly had started to hang out over my belt and sag a bit, but I could still throw a man half my age in a wrestling bout. That strength was why I was up on that cross, rubbing my naked, sweating ass where so many men had before. Performing as a wrestler and strongman in local theaters kept me fed, but I couldn’t do it forever. Just before I left a town, I would sometimes hire myself out as muscle for local brigands or thieves.

Three scrawny kids had approached me one night after a show. They were going to take a ship to the East, but first they needed the money. The plan was to rough up some farmers on the way to the port. I could keep whatever money they didn’t need for the passage. I knew their type, with the scared eyes and too-obvious glances back at the door: deserters from one of the Legions. Probably running from a conscription notice.

I took the job, the kids were idiots, and we got caught. They didn’t know the cost of a ship, and I didn’t tell them, but we made enough money for them to travel in comfort and for me
to buy a couple of pretty slave girls and retire to a small winemaking villa of my own. The trouble was that our activities managed to draw the attention of the local Auxilia, and a band of soldiers stumbled across our fearless leader as he was hauling a stolen horse with our latest “donor’s” brand. He led them to the rest of us, we spent a night chained in some dark hole, and the next day we were carrying the pieces of our own crosses out to where we were going to die.

Sometimes the Romans made a big show of their crucifixions. Bringing the whole city out to watch the condemned march out, a long whipping, a big speech by some important official, and then the main event. Our execution was the opposite. They hustled out beyond the town gates to where about a dozen permanent posts lined the road. They pulled our clothes off (one of the kids wailed at this), and let us stand there naked in the early morning humidity while they lined our patibuli up all nice and neat on the ground.

They came for the three deserters first, one at a time. Each one followed the same pattern: a short struggle before getting a punch to the gut, a brief “no no no no please!”, then *thunk*, scream, *thunk*, scream, repeated until he was on his cross.

The four Auxilia soldiers who came for me were nervous. They seemed shocked when I turned and walked to my patibulum. I told myself it was because I wanted to show the kids how to die like a man, but I think I was mostly still in shock at how fast this was all moving. In any case, I screamed just as loud as they did when the Auxilia drove the nails into my wrists. It felt so *wrong*! My body wanted to recoil away from the invading metal, but my hands wouldn’t budge! They pulled to my feet, arms outstretched, and the put me up onto the stipes. They struggled to lift me off the ground just the few inches need to needed opening carved into the patibulum above the top of the stipes. I didn’t help them much, thrashing and bellowing the way I was.

I must have made a ridiculous sight: tall, muscular, hairy, my cock swinging as six Auxilia struggled to get me crucified. There was no one on the road this early, and those who might be inclined to walk out of the gates were happy to wait until we were fully crucified.

You can probably guess the rest. The soldiers managed to put my cross together, and they nailed my feet as fast as they could. The pinned my feet flat against the post, but curved at it was my knees naturally spread, letting my cock and balls hang exposed. Then my life became solely focused on trying to relieve the pain.

With my perch on the cross secured, I could look around at me surroundings while I panted and moaned. Of the four of us criminals, I was crucified closest to the town gates. We were facing toward the ocean, just a few miles away. The deserters got see how tantalizingly close their goal was before they died. A few travelers had ventured into the road, and they took pains to avoid looking at the writhing, freshly crucified men. The guards didn’t bother to do any guarding; all but one of them were lounging under the trees on the other side of the road.

Our fearless leader was crucified immediately to my right. He was scrawny and pale, with a shock of dark hair and almost no body hair. I probably had more hair on my body then the three of them combined. He had been nailed the same way I was, but was trying to stand on his feet. The effort made him wail, and he tilted his head toward the sky, crying out to anyone who would listen (which was no one) that he was sorry. His face and chest were bright red already. As the sun crept higher, we would all burn horribly.

I did not look any less ridiculous. I had always been a prolific sweater (a downside of being a big man!), and I was already covered in a heavy sheen of water. I looked down at my hairy chest and stomach, my limp, pink cock, and my shattered feet...and then the sweat poured into my eyes, stinging and burning. My instinct was to wipe it away...but I couldn’t even feel my hands any more. The ground below my cross was already turning to mud as the salty rain spilled from my body in a steady patter.

“Jupiter’s balls, you’re disgusting,” called a soldier as he approached with a wooden bucket. “I can *hear* you sweating. Thought you were taking a really long piss.”

“You’re gonna die way before these guys,” the soldier reached the base of my cross (as my feet were nailed only inches from the ground, he was not far from eye level with me) and dipped a sponge-tipped stick into the bucket. After a few moments, he removed the stick and held it up to me. “Too bad I bet on you to last the longest before I knew how much you sweat.”

I had to slide my ass up on the wood a little more in order to lean out and grasp the sponge with my mouth. I gritted my teeth and growled through the pain, but I managed to buy down on the sponge. I sucked the thing like it was my mother’s teat, but the soldier pulled it away too soon.

“You’re dying well, thief,” the soldier dropped the stick back into the bucket. “I won’t make it any worse for you.” He turned and, being careful not to cross too close in front of me, headed to the next cross and its naked, crying, wiggling occupant.
 
I waited until the soldier cleared my cross before I pissed. My urine joined my sweat in the frothing mud at the base of my cross.

I guess I felt a little bit better. My body was revolting against the overwhelming *wrongness* of being pierced by four nails and unable to move. A queasy feeling was building in my stomach. Oh, gods...I had fish for my last meal...and it was so hot...I could feel the sun beating down on my shoulders. Thank the gods that I had kept most of my hair as I aged. I had seen the blistered, bleeding scalp of a bald man on a cross once as I walked on the road to Thessalonike a few years ago. I may have joined in the crowd taunting him, though...another mercy that no one in this town seemed interested in mocking us.

I looked back over at the cross to my right, holding the fearless leader of my little group of thieves. The soldier who gave me the sponge of water was next to the naked kid, who was barely out of teens. He was holding the sponge out in front of the kid’s face, forcing the deserter to stretch out to reach it. The kid sobbed as he did so, until the soldier finally relented and let him suck on the sponge.

The kid made a fool of himself when the soldier pulled the sponge away. “Please, just a little more! Please, it hurts so much—-“ the kid’s begging was cut off by a high-pitched yelp as the soldier smacked his dangling balls.

Our fearless leader was not dying well.

The skinny kid fell into the crouch position to hang from his wrists. The nails in his feet forced his knees apart, and he hung there moaning with the fresh pain in his balls from the soldier’s farewell tap. He hung there with his skinny, pale legs almost parallel to the ground, panting in quick, shallow breaths. The trouble with the low-hanging position, I had noticed, was that being so stretched out makes it bloody tough to breathe. So here was the kid trying to make about eight different sounds at once, all while barely being able to exhale, and the awful sound, on top of all the other pains I was experiencing, finally made me snap.

“Neptune’s sake, kid, can you just die quietly?” I turned my head to yell some more at him, and instinctively tried to tuck my left arm down and into my body for leverage. My mistake. I ended up yanking my left wrist against the nail there. Metal scraped against bone and I made a sound the kid next to me hadn’t even managed yet. I instinctively pulled my upper body back toward the cross, but that caused my sweat-covered ass to lose its leverage against the rubbed-smooth wood of the stipes. I crashed down into the hanging position, scraping my ass against the rough wood of the lower portion of the cross and coming to a jarring stop.

Pain flared from my nailed wrists and my shoulders felt like they were going to pop off my torso. I took a deep breath to try to scream, but suddenly I could barely release anything from my lungs.

My body had seen enough. The lurking queasiness in my stomach overpowered everything else. There was no fighting it at this point, so I spread my knees as wide as I could and shat all over the ground beneath me. Yesterday evening’s fish splattered into the mix of sweat, dirt, and urine, accompanied by a loud, wet farting sound from my body.

I didn’t feel any better when it was done.

From the trees on the other side of the road come a cry of exultation. One of the Auxilia soldiers over there had just won the first-to-shit-themselves bet. I looked over at the kid I had been about to berate for dying too loudly. He had clearly seen the whole episode. He raised his head and choked out a sentence.

“A little...loud...yourself.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, a tortured rasp in any case. From the end of our little row of crosses, the soldier who had handed out the water called back to his comrades, “Who had the big one as the first shitter? Good pick, Marcus!”

I leaned my back and head against the wood as much as I could, then launched myself forward with a groan. For a moment, my world exploded with pain as my ruined feet took all of my considerable weight. But then I was able to activate my shoulders and drive with my thick leg muscles. My midsection (being the part that wasn’t nailed in place) bowed out and away from the stipes. It probably looked like I was thrusting my cock out for all to see, but everyone in a position to watch had seen everything I had already.

I struggled into a standing position on the cross and filled down several breaths of air. The smell of my own body odor, sweat, urine, and filth overwhelmed me, but air was air. I guess I wouldn’t have a pleasant breath ever again. Now that I was able to breathe, I leaned my upper body out again while maneuvering my ass to rest in the same rubbed-smooth spot on the would as I had before. The kid watched me while I placed myself on my perch. When he saw that I could breathe and wasn’t in total agony from standing on the nails in my feet, he looked down at his own feet and up at his smashed and mangled hands, already curling into purple mess.

“You can do it.” I called down to him. “It’s going to hurt, yes. But you can breathe up here.”

The kid wasn’t as strong as I was. He tried to push himself out and up with his legs the way I had. He failed the first couple of times, jolting his wrists and falling back to the crouch with a scream. But finally he made it. I talked him through finding the smooth spot on his own cross.

“That’s it...just push your cheeks back into the wood. Harder. Let the wood push into your crack.” The kid shook his head at the humiliation of being coached how to maneuver his ass by another naked man. “Hey,” I called out to him, “Almost there...now let the wood take your weight!” The kid settled into the same position I was in. It was humiliating, but we could breathe and the pain from our nails was a only a constant, dull ache instead of a world-exploding agony. As soon as he stopped moving, the kid pissed. At least he was making peace with lack of privacy on the cross.

After taking his piss, the kid finally quieted down and we hung there, two naked men with asses pushed obscenely against the unyielding posts of our crosses. Being up here was like being fucked by Rome. The Romans themselves didn’t mind men fucking other men in general, as long as you weren’t the receiver. On these crosses, we could not avoid the rape.

At least they hadn’t bothered to give us the little horns or wood planks for us to fuck ourselves with in our agony which I had seen used in the bigger cities and executions of infamous criminals. Provincial crucifixions were much simpler affairs.

I hung there for a few minutes, I think, sweating and panting, but time doesn’t really exist on a cross. The sun was fully up now and the humidity was not going anywhere. Looking to my left, I saw that a group of women had set up a market just outside of the gates. More travelers were on the road. A man was approaching carrying a sack, presumably filled with food or goods he had bought at the market. He looked at us (me in particular) with amusement. Then he got close enough to smell me.

“Fucking stinking barbarians,” he grunted and hurried on his way.

I was born in Nicomedia.
 
Part III (one more to go)


“I’m scared,” the young deserter-turned-thief next to me moaned, “I don’t wanna die.”

I would have answered with something along the lines of, “It’s a little late now, because we’re most definitely dying,” but I was in trouble. My naked ass was so wet and the smooth spot on my cross now so slick that I couldn’t maintain my perch against the stipes. I let myself slide down into the crouched hanging position, but I wasn’t able to push my body out and away from the post, so my ass ended up scratched again on the rough wood of the tree.

I had to transition my breathing now that I was down in the hanging position. Short breaths, not much in, because I couldn’t exhale much out. It took too much effort to exhale for me to answer the kid with anything more than a grunt. For a while it was worth it for the blessed relief in my legs and feet. But then came the inevitable onslaught of pain in my arms and shoulders and the fatigue of breathing. I looked over at the kid, who was doing an incredible job of holding himself up in the ass-against-cross pose. His legs were shaking but he was still up there.

Sometimes they surprise you.

The water-bucket-bearing soldier appeared next to me with a freshly-dripping sponge. “Okay, Big Guy. Time for more water...oh...gods that smells!”

The soldier looked down at the soup of fetid bodily fluids at the base of my cross. “You’ve been busy over here. I didn’t think people held that much....stuff....inside them.” He waved the sponge up above my head. “Come and get it, Big Guy. Can’t have you hanging here and dying too soon.”

I struggled my way back up the cross and grabbed the sponge in my teeth. The water was hot, but in my state it tasted like the gods-damned divine ambrosia. I sucked and sucked at the sponge, even biting into it to get every last drop of water. Far too soon, though, the guard tugged it out of my mouth. I protested, lunging forward until the nails in my wrists stopped me. I think I was as surprised as the guard, but it was pure, primal survival instinct. My body was doing what it was destined to do: try to live.

“None of that, big guy,” the guard dipped his sponge back into the water. “I told you last time you were dying well. Don’t beg like these others.”

I watched him walk the few feet over to the deserter’s cross. He played with the kid, making him move his ass off the wood and fully stand on the nails in his feet to get a drink. I couldn’t help but watch the kid’s cock flop against his bare thighs as he struggle. After mostly getting water all over his chest, he collapsed into the crouched position. The guard gave him another smack on the balls and moved on to the next cross.

The kid was hanging low, legs splayed open, shaking his head and muttering, “Die...gon...die...scared...”

I pressed as hard as I could on my broken feet, getting as high on the cross as I could. With agonized cry, I threw my ass back against the cross yet again. I found purchase somewhere above the smooth spot. The wood was rough and dug into the sensitive skin between my ass cheeks, but l could hold myself up easier.

From one of the crosses farther down the row came a loud fart and the sound of liquid splashing onto the ground.

“Oh, you son of a whore! You couldn’t wait until I was done???”

“Look at me, Kid.” The Young deserter looked up at me with eyes wide with terror and pain. Tears ran down his reddened face. Hanging low, he couldn’t say a long sentence, but he mouthed his words to me.

“I want to go home.”

I shook my head. “We’re...ah...dying today, kid.” Before he could wail or look away, I adjusted my position on the cross (and got a spike of pain up my arm from a nail brushing bone) and continued. “And I don’t want you staring at my cock all day.” The kid yanked his eyes away from my naked manhood, not realizing that was my pain-addled brain’s attempt at a joke.

“You ever fucked a girl?” The kid jerked in surprise at the question, moaned in pain, and nodded. “Was she pretty?” Another nod. “Then think of her. Let your last memories be good ones.”

That seemed to calm the kid down. He squeezed his eyes shut and looked down at the ground.

My legs were burning with the effort to keep myself planted so high up on the cross. Time to hang low again. I slid down the cross back into the hanging position and looked down at the ground. Sweat continued to rain down into the fetid slush. Flies were congregating in the mixture now, eager to feast on my shit. Soon the would migrant to my own body. For the first time, despair overwhelmed me. I was about to die, naked and alone on this cross. I changed up my breathing, started the short, shallow breaths needed to survive hanging low, and decided to follow my own advice.

Gods, I wished I could have one more good fuck before I died. My last one at all was, what, two weeks ago? She was the daughter of a farmer at one of the first places we shook down. I put on a big show for the nervous deserters, telling the farmer that they money he had wasn’t nearly enough, but that I would overlook it for some time with his daughter. I took the stoic girl into an empty stable, pulled her shift down, and pushed her onto all fours in a pile of hay. She barely made a noise as I gave my cock a glob of spit and a few strokes to get it ready. She was no virgin, I could tell that for sure when I entered her. I took a hold of her hips, thrusted for a bit, and came inside her. It was not a particularly good ejaculation, and the whole encounter wasn’t about the sex anyway.

No, I needed to think of Athenais.

She was an actress with a traveling company that wandered the coastal road between Smyrna, Miletus, Halicarnassus, and up to Chalcedon and Byzantion for their annual festivals. I tagged along with the group when I was young and just starting out with my wrestling and strength shows. My belly might be jiggling now, but back then I was young and beautiful (except for all the body hair, but it helped with my act)with barely an ounce of fat on me!

Athenais was gorgeous, too. We were nearly the same age. Tall and tan, with heavy tits and a dancers’ muscles, her beauty was not in the soft, refined styles of the big cities, but drove me crazy. I fell in love with her the first time I heard her laughing around the campfire and saw the glint in her eyes from the flames.

A week later, the group asked me to help them out by putting on a garish costume and playing Zeus the Bull in a depiction of the god’s pursuit and conquest of the beautiful Europa. I was glad for the ridiculously huge swinging cock built into the costume as I chased the lovely (and naked) Athenais across the theater. She cackled in delight and her breasts swang and bounced as we circled the theater floor. When I finally “caught” her and acted at fucking her with the giant cock seen into the costume, she bucked her hips and moaned while I made the closest thing to bull noises that I could. The crowd roared its approval.

That night, she came to my makeshift tent and straddled me, called me her bull, and rode me. Even hanging on my cross 20 years later, I could remember my scream and the intense flood of pleasure as I came inside Athenais that night.

Then my shoulder cramped, the kid next to me finally released his bowels, and my mind returned to the fact that I was dying.
 
Part 4/4


When you’re on the cross, always remember that it only gets worse. The pain only increases. Your muscles cramp harder as time goes on. And the thirst. Oh, the thirst.

The sun blazed down on us from directly above. I could feel my exposed skin burning, especially on my shoulders and knees, which stuck out beyond any shade my body could provide. Every instinct screamed at me
to cover up, to move, to wipe the sweat and blood out of my eyes, but I was pinned. My body never truly adapted to my new circumstances. It kept trying to survive.

The cramps became constant when the sun hit its height. They seemed to hit all four of us at once. The kid next to me was currently shrieking. I could see the muscles squeezing tight underneath the reddened skin of his legs. For me, the torment was in my broad shoulders. Every time I tried to lower myself into the hanging position, the muscles there seized and fought against me. Without any support for our feet and no seats or (gods, I might have used one) a cornu to support our bodies, we withered and lost strength quickly in the heat and humidity.

“6 hours, my hairy friend! Drinky time!” announced the guard who delivered the next round of drinks. There had been a shift change; this new guard was not as sympathetic to me.

I pushed up with my legs to get at the sweet, refreshing water. My mouth was so dry...but the muscles I had been so proud of, once so powerful, refused to budge. I hadn’t pissed since that first time back when I was freshly crucified. A wave of dizziness washed over me and I almost passed out. I took a deep breath and, accompanied by laughing from the guard, I moaned and grunted and pulled myself up to the standing position.

“Atta boy,” the guard mocked me and lowered the dark sponge to my mouth. I bit down on it greedily and sucked the life-giving wat—-

And gagged. And retched. And coughed. My legs screamed in cramping agony.

It was wine. Hot, sour wine. My stomach turned inside out and I retched and heaved. Nothing came out, of course. My stomach was empty.

The new guard laughed. “Surprise!” He dipped the sponge again. “Prefect says you need to be dead by nightfall, so no more water. Enjoy your last drink!”

My body was craving liquid so badly that I didn’t even think before shoving my face back into the sponge. The guard laughed as I slurped and slurped. When he finally pulled the sponge away, he made sure to smear it all
Over my face and bare chest.

“Have fun with the bugs,” he called back over his shoulder before moving on to the kid hanging next to me.

I slid back down to the hanging position. One the shoulder cramps died down, I started my breathing again. My abdominal muscles were so tired I could barely get any air out of my lungs. I hung there wheezing, listening to the deserters pleading for water, and looked down between my legs at my limp, sunburned cock, and below that, the muddy stew of filth and blood below my cross.

That was going to be my legacy. Shit and piss and nothing else. I did nothing with my life, left no children, no one will even know that I died here.

I even killed my lovely Athenais, so long ago.

I got her pregnant. I knew how to avoid it. I should have sprayed my seed on her ass or her back or her tits, but after the pleasure of our first time, I came inside her womb every time. At the end of that glorious summer, she came to me and said she had missed her regular bleeding, her breasts were swollen, and she felt ill. One of the older women in the town we were traveling through confirmed it, Athenais was with child.

She couldn’t carry it. The career of an actress is short enough, and children only increased the risks. Neither of us had family to go home
to; marriage was not an option yet with our professions. She said it would not be a problem. A quick trip to a healer woman for a dose of silphium and her monthly blood would return.

A healer was easy to find. Athenais paid for the silphium mix and drank it that night. Her blood came a few hours later, just as the healer said it would. But it did not stop. The women of the performing group kicked me out of the tent and tended to Athenais. They used all of their women’s ways of stopped the bleeding, but nothing worked. As dawn broke, one of the women ran to me, saying that if I wanted to say anything to Athenais, I needed to do it now.

The inside of the little tent reeked with the metallic smell of blood. Athenais lay on her cushions, pale and weak, with piles of bloodied rags piled up with nowhere to go. I wanted to comfort her, to hold her as she passed, but as soon as she saw me her sweat-covered face curled up anger.

“Get out of here!” She hissed at me. “This is your fault! Get him out of here!”

The women grabbed me and pulled me out of the tent. I went back to my own tent, bundled my few possessions, and left the camp. I knew Athenais didn’t mean what she said, that she was scared and in pain, but that only made it hurt more. I never ran across the troupe again, but I knew she died in that tent, scared and alone.

It took me 20 years, but now I knew how she felt.

The sun started to sink in the sky. I had stopped sweating a while ago. I couldn’t see anything, my vision was so blurry. My lips were so cracked and my mouth so dry it wouldn’t even open. The blurry form
of the kid next to me hung low and unmoving, head bowed to his chest. I hoped he died thinking of fucking that girl.

Something tore in my abdominal muscles as I hung low. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Air! I needed air! With the body’s unending desire to live, I pushed and pulled myself to the top of the cross and took a ragged breath of air.

“He the last one?” A voice came from below me.

“Yeah. The other three are dead.”

“He lasted longer than I thought. Should we do it?”

“Sure. No point in dragging this out for him. Let’s do it and go home.”

Suddenly, something heavy and unyielding smashed into my left shin, and pain exploded through every fiber of my being. I have no idea if I made a sound, but if I did it would have been a roar of pure agony. I tilted on the cross toward my right side, trying to get away from the pain, and something popped in my left shoulder. Then the same explosion of pain in my right shin.

I crashed down the cross until the nails in my wrists stopped my fall. My right shoulder popped out of socket with the impact. None of my limbs could move. I couldn’t breathe. My chest and stomach heaved, trying to get new air in. I looked up at the blue sky. Through the panic and pain, something in my mind said, “This is it. This is death. It’s here.”

Through some inner strength, I managed to burp out old, stale air and suck in one more deep breath. I didn’t notice the blackness creeping into my vision until suddenly, I realized I couldn’t see. As I faded away, I wondered if Athenais would be waiting to greet me on the other side.

——————

The naked bodies of the little robber band hung on the crosses overnight. The next morning, a gang of slaves arrived to pull the bodies down and dispose of them. The three scrawny deserters were easy. The corpses were largely untouched and the smell, though unpleasant, was fairly typical.

As far as the big man on the end, however, the slaves initially objected to taking him down. They couldn’t get to his body without stepping through a muddy morass of stinking fluids, and the cloud of flies around the compound fractures in his legs would bite and harass them. It took an overseer to berate the work gang and point out that the corpse would only get worse, and gods help them if it burst open in this heat. We can’t have this disgusting site marring the road for the governor’s visit tomorrow.

The slaves did their unpleasant work, and the four naked bodies were carted to the other side of the town, where they were dumped down a hillside and allowed to tumble into the refuse pile at the bottom.
 
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This was a really impressive story, thanks for posting

Aedile said:
Part 4/4


When you’re on the cross, always remember that it only gets worse. The pain only increases. Your muscles cramp harder as time goes on. And the thirst. Oh, the thirst.

The sun blazed down on us from directly above. I could feel my exposed skin burning, especially on my shoulders and knees, which stuck out beyond any shade my body could provide. Every instinct screamed at me
to cover up, to move, to wipe the sweat and blood out of my eyes, but I was pinned. My body never truly adapted to my new circumstances. It kept trying to survive.

The cramps became constant when the sun hit its height. They seemed to hit all four of us at once. The kid next to me was currently shrieking. I could see the muscles squeezing tight underneath the reddened skin of his legs. For me, the torment was in my broad shoulders. Every time I tried to lower myself into the hanging position, the muscles there seized and fought against me. Without any support for our feet and no seats or (gods, I might have used one) a cornu to support our bodies, we withered and lost strength quickly in the heat and humidity.

“6 hours, my hairy friend! Drinky time!” announced the guard who delivered the next round of drinks. There had been a shift change; this new guard was not as sympathetic to me.

I pushed up with my legs to get at the sweet, refreshing water. My mouth was so dry...but the muscles I had been so proud of, once so powerful, refused to budge. I hadn’t pissed since that first time back when I was freshly crucified. A wave of dizziness washed over me and I almost passed out. I took a deep breath and, accompanied by laughing from the guard, I moaned and grunted and pulled myself up to the standing position.

“Atta boy,” the guard mocked me and lowered the dark sponge to my mouth. I bit down on it greedily and sucked the life-giving wat—-

And gagged. And retched. And coughed. My legs screamed in cramping agony.

It was wine. Hot, sour wine. My stomach turned inside out and I retched and heaved. Nothing came out, of course. My stomach was empty.

The new guard laughed. “Surprise!” He dipped the sponge again. “Prefect says you need to be dead by nightfall, so no more water. Enjoy your last drink!”

My body was craving liquid so badly that I didn’t even think before shoving my face back into the sponge. The guard laughed as I slurped and slurped. When he finally pulled the sponge away, he made sure to smear it all
Over my face and bare chest.

“Have fun with the bugs,” he called back over his shoulder before moving on to the kid hanging next to me.

I slid back down to the hanging position. One the shoulder cramps died down, I started my breathing again. My abdominal muscles were so tired I could barely get any air out of my lungs. I hung there wheezing, listening to the deserters pleading for water, and looked down between my legs at my limp, sunburned cock, and below that, the muddy stew of filth and blood below my cross.

That was going to be my legacy. Shit and piss and nothing else. I did nothing with my life, left no children, no one will even know that I died here.

I even killed my lovely Athenais, so long ago.

I got her pregnant. I knew how to avoid it. I should have sprayed my seed on her ass or her back or her tits, but after the pleasure of our first time, I came inside her womb every time. At the end of that glorious summer, she came to me and said she had missed her regular bleeding, her breasts were swollen, and she felt ill. One of the older women in the town we were traveling through confirmed it, Athenais was with child.

She couldn’t carry it. The career of an actress is short enough, and children only increased the risks. Neither of us had family to go home
to; marriage was not an option yet with our professions. She said it would not be a problem. A quick trip to a healer woman for a dose of silphium and her monthly blood would return.

A healer was easy to find. Athenais paid for the silphium mix and drank it that night. Her blood came a few hours later, just as the healer said it would. But it did not stop. The women of the performing group kicked me out of the tent and tended to Athenais. They used all of their women’s ways of stopped the bleeding, but nothing worked. As dawn broke, one of the women ran to me, saying that if I wanted to say anything to Athenais, I needed to do it now.

The inside of the little tent reeked with the metallic smell of blood. Athenais lay on her cushions, pale and weak, with piles of bloodied rags piled up with nowhere to go. I wanted to comfort her, to hold her as she passed, but as soon as she saw me her sweat-covered face curled up anger.

“Get out of here!” She hissed at me. “This is your fault! Get him out of here!”

The women grabbed me and pulled me out of the tent. I went back to my own tent, bundled my few possessions, and left the camp. I knew Athenais didn’t mean what she said, that she was scared and in pain, but that only made it hurt more. I never ran across the troupe again, but I knew she died in that tent, scared and alone.

It took me 20 years, but now I knew how she felt.

The sun started to sink in the sky. I had stopped sweating a while ago. I couldn’t see anything, my vision was so blurry. My lips were so cracked and my mouth so dry it wouldn’t even open. The blurry form
of the kid next to me hung low and unmoving, head bowed to his chest. I hoped he died thinking of fucking that girl.

Something tore in my abdominal muscles as I hung low. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Air! I needed air! With the body’s unending desire to live, I pushed and pulled myself to the top of the cross and took a ragged breath of air.

“He the last one?” A voice came from below me.

“Yeah. The other three are dead.”

“He lasted longer than I thought. Should we do it?”

“Sure. No point in dragging this out for him. Let’s do it and go home.”

Suddenly, something heavy and unyielding smashed into my left shin, and pain exploded through every fiber of my being. I have no idea if I made a sound, but if I did it would have been a roar of pure agony. I tilted on the cross toward my right side, trying to get away from the pain, and something popped in my left shoulder. Then the same explosion of pain in my right shin.

I crashed down the cross until the nails in my wrists stopped my fall. My right shoulder popped out of socket with the impact. None of my limbs could move. I couldn’t breathe. My chest and stomach heaved, trying to get new air in. I looked up at the blue sky. Through the panic and pain, something in my mind said, “This is it. This is death. It’s here.”

Through some inner strength, I managed to burp out old, stale air and suck in one more deep breath. I didn’t notice the blackness creeping into my vision until suddenly, I realized I couldn’t see. As I faded away, I wondered if Athenais would be waiting to greet me on the other side.

——————

The naked bodies of the little robber band hung on the crosses overnight. The next morning, a gang of slaves arrived to pull the bodies down and dispose of them. The three scrawny deserters were easy. The corpses were largely untouched and the smell, though unpleasant, was fairly typical.

As far as the big man on the end, however, the slaves initially objected to taking him down. They couldn’t get to his body without stepping through a muddy morass of stinking fluids, and the cloud of flies around the compound fractures in his legs would bite and harass them. It took an overseer to berate the work gang and point out that the corpse would only get worse, and gods help them if it burst open in this heat. We can’t have this disgusting site marring the road for the governor’s visit tomorrow.

The slaves did their unpleasant work, and the four naked bodies were carted to the other side of the town, where they were dumped down a hillside and allowed to tumble into the refuse pile at the bottom.
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Aedile said:
Part III (one more to go)


“I’m scared,” the young deserter-turned-thief next to me moaned, “I don’t wanna die.”

I would have answered with something along the lines of, “It’s a little late now, because we’re most definitely dying,” but I was in trouble. My naked ass was so wet and the smooth spot on my cross now so slick that I couldn’t maintain my perch against the stipes. I let myself slide down into the crouched hanging position, but I wasn’t able to push my body out and away from the post, so my ass ended up scratched again on the rough wood of the tree.

I had to transition my breathing now that I was down in the hanging position. Short breaths, not much in, because I couldn’t exhale much out. It took too much effort to exhale for me to answer the kid with anything more than a grunt. For a while it was worth it for the blessed relief in my legs and feet. But then came the inevitable onslaught of pain in my arms and shoulders and the fatigue of breathing. I looked over at the kid, who was doing an incredible job of holding himself up in the ass-against-cross pose. His legs were shaking but he was still up there.

Sometimes they surprise you.

The water-bucket-bearing soldier appeared next to me with a freshly-dripping sponge. “Okay, Big Guy. Time for more water...oh...gods that smells!”

The soldier looked down at the soup of fetid bodily fluids at the base of my cross. “You’ve been busy over here. I didn’t think people held that much....stuff....inside them.” He waved the sponge up above my head. “Come and get it, Big Guy. Can’t have you hanging here and dying too soon.”

I struggled my way back up the cross and grabbed the sponge in my teeth. The water was hot, but in my state it tasted like the gods-damned divine ambrosia. I sucked and sucked at the sponge, even biting into it to get every last drop of water. Far too soon, though, the guard tugged it out of my mouth. I protested, lunging forward until the nails in my wrists stopped me. I think I was as surprised as the guard, but it was pure, primal survival instinct. My body was doing what it was destined to do: try to live.

“None of that, big guy,” the guard dipped his sponge back into the water. “I told you last time you were dying well. Don’t beg like these others.”

I watched him walk the few feet over to the deserter’s cross. He played with the kid, making him move his ass off the wood and fully stand on the nails in his feet to get a drink. I couldn’t help but watch the kid’s cock flop against his bare thighs as he struggle. After mostly getting water all over his chest, he collapsed into the crouched position. The guard gave him another smack on the balls and moved on to the next cross.

The kid was hanging low, legs splayed open, shaking his head and muttering, “Die...gon...die...scared...”

I pressed as hard as I could on my broken feet, getting as high on the cross as I could. With agonized cry, I threw my ass back against the cross yet again. I found purchase somewhere above the smooth spot. The wood was rough and dug into the sensitive skin between my ass cheeks, but l could hold myself up easier.

From one of the crosses farther down the row came a loud fart and the sound of liquid splashing onto the ground.

“Oh, you son of a whore! You couldn’t wait until I was done???”

“Look at me, Kid.” The Young deserter looked up at me with eyes wide with terror and pain. Tears ran down his reddened face. Hanging low, he couldn’t say a long sentence, but he mouthed his words to me.

“I want to go home.”

I shook my head. “We’re...ah...dying today, kid.” Before he could wail or look away, I adjusted my position on the cross (and got a spike of pain up my arm from a nail brushing bone) and continued. “And I don’t want you staring at my cock all day.” The kid yanked his eyes away from my naked manhood, not realizing that was my pain-addled brain’s attempt at a joke.

“You ever fucked a girl?” The kid jerked in surprise at the question, moaned in pain, and nodded. “Was she pretty?” Another nod. “Then think of her. Let your last memories be good ones.”

That seemed to calm the kid down. He squeezed his eyes shut and looked down at the ground.

My legs were burning with the effort to keep myself planted so high up on the cross. Time to hang low again. I slid down the cross back into the hanging position and looked down at the ground. Sweat continued to rain down into the fetid slush. Flies were congregating in the mixture now, eager to feast on my shit. Soon the would migrant to my own body. For the first time, despair overwhelmed me. I was about to die, naked and alone on this cross. I changed up my breathing, started the short, shallow breaths needed to survive hanging low, and decided to follow my own advice.

Gods, I wished I could have one more good fuck before I died. My last one at all was, what, two weeks ago? She was the daughter of a farmer at one of the first places we shook down. I put on a big show for the nervous deserters, telling the farmer that they money he had wasn’t nearly enough, but that I would overlook it for some time with his daughter. I took the stoic girl into an empty stable, pulled her shift down, and pushed her onto all fours in a pile of hay. She barely made a noise as I gave my cock a glob of spit and a few strokes to get it ready. She was no virgin, I could tell that for sure when I entered her. I took a hold of her hips, thrusted for a bit, and came inside her. It was not a particularly good ejaculation, and the whole encounter wasn’t about the sex anyway.

No, I needed to think of Athenais.

She was an actress with a traveling company that wandered the coastal road between Smyrna, Miletus, Halicarnassus, and up to Chalcedon and Byzantion for their annual festivals. I tagged along with the group when I was young and just starting out with my wrestling and strength shows. My belly might be jiggling now, but back then I was young and beautiful (except for all the body hair, but it helped with my act)with barely an ounce of fat on me!

Athenais was gorgeous, too. We were nearly the same age. Tall and tan, with heavy tits and a dancers’ muscles, her beauty was not in the soft, refined styles of the big cities, but drove me crazy. I fell in love with her the first time I heard her laughing around the campfire and saw the glint in her eyes from the flames.

A week later, the group asked me to help them out by putting on a garish costume and playing Zeus the Bull in a depiction of the god’s pursuit and conquest of the beautiful Europa. I was glad for the ridiculously huge swinging cock built into the costume as I chased the lovely (and naked) Athenais across the theater. She cackled in delight and her breasts swang and bounced as we circled the theater floor. When I finally “caught” her and acted at fucking her with the giant cock seen into the costume, she bucked her hips and moaned while I made the closest thing to bull noises that I could. The crowd roared its approval.

That night, she came to my makeshift tent and straddled me, called me her bull, and rode me. Even hanging on my cross 20 years later, I could remember my scream and the intense flood of pleasure as I came inside Athenais that night.

Then my shoulder cramped, the kid next to me finally released his bowels, and my mind returned to the fact that I was dying.
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I thought it would fun to write a short epilogue tying up one of the loose ends from the story: the Thracian farmgirl our main character remembered as his last fuck.

It doesn’t need to go into the archived story or anything. Just something fun I cranked out when inspiration struck. It can be an end-credits scene or something :)

———————————-

Epilogue

Nine months after a traveling wrestler died naked on a cross outside a Thracian town, a farmer’s daughter gave birth to a fatherless baby girl.

The birth was long and difficult. The mother was skinny, ill-fed and with narrow hips. The baby was one of the biggest girls the midwife had ever seen come out of a womb. For hours, lit only by a single fire in the dead of winter, the mother writhed and moaned in her labor. For a terrifying hour, it looked like the baby would be stuck in the birth canal, and the midwife told the mother to pray. The farmer’s daughter cried and prayed to Eileithyia for mercy. She gathered her strength and pushed one more time, screaming until her throat gave out.

But it worked. The midwife placed the baby girl, with a thick tuft of black hair on her head, into her mother’s arms. The mother wept with relief and joy, kissing her daughter and holding her close as the infant’s hearty cries gradually calmed. When the baby had quieted down, the farmer’s daughter instinctively offered the child her breast, just a small lump before pregnancy but now filled with milk, and the baby drank eagerly.

The farmer and his daughter never said who the father was. Rumors flew around the local
village. Was it one of the local boys? That didn’t seem right; they were all planting their own fields back in the spring. Maybe one of the older men had a fling with her? Unlikely, the village gossipers decided, the girl never left her father’s side when they came into town.

Wasn’t there a robber gang that came through about that time? The governor sent messengers proclaiming that his brave soldiers had caught and crucified a band of deserters who were thieving from the good people of Thrace back in the spring, and there was usually some kind of brigandage popping up every couple of months or so. The farmers often came into town with stories of encounters with such ruffians. Maybe one of those lawless men ravished the girl? If so, why didn’t she just drink some silphium afterward?

Eventually, the gossipers moved on to other matters. It was always good to have children around, and the little girl looked like she was going to grow up tall and strong. And beautiful, the old women cooed every time her
mother brought her to market.

What did it matter who the father was?
 
Aedile said:
The women grabbed me and pulled me out of the tent. I went back to my own tent, bundled my few possessions, and left the camp. I knew Athenais didn’t mean what she said, that she was scared and in pain, but that only made it hurt more. I never ran across the troupe again, but I knew she died in that tent, scared and alone.

It took me 20 years, but now I knew how she felt.
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:clapping:Very good written story, Aedile!:clapping:

Interesting element : he hardly thinks back about his crimes, but somehow he feels his own agony on the cross as a kind of 'justice' for his responsability in the death of Athenais.
 
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