And so:
The march did finally come to an end. The executioners waited with their five long stakes jutting from the ground, the poles they would use to lift the condemned tripod staked in readiness. A Magistrate preening before the crowd stepped up and read the sentence then bowed to the pavilion. A Priest of the Father read from the Book of the dead and the condemned were motioned to lie down as the hammers and nails came out.
It was only then that Dav once again really noticed the other three men among the prisoners. They whimpered and wailed even before the first strokes pushed the cruel metal through their flesh. They shivered and jerked as one after the other they were raised aloft, they shrieked again as legs were caught and bound to the upright before nail was smashed deep into the flesh of each foot.
Ragborn was next. At first he roared defiance, then he simply roared as the hammer blows fell. He was silent for a time as he was lifted though Dav and the other soldiers present tensed half expecting him to kick out but he only started roaring again as the nails pinned his feet to that fatal tree.
When it came to Cherry the decorum, as tenuous as it had been, threatened to break down, one of the executioners even got as far as loosening his hose. Dav snapped, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The protests of the Priests were more polite but fairly pointed as well. Confronted with both the threat of immediate violence and divine vengeance the executioners decided not to try and claim their ‘traditional rights’ that could be found nowhere in law this time. Not that it spared Cherry an agony of violence as first one then another nail beat into her wrists. She screamed and screamed but of course there was no mercy just the grim progress of the law.
She went aloft, never again to touch ground among the living and Dav felt hot shame as he caught himself focusing on her heaving chest and oddly pert nipples. He looked away and then back as the executioners took her legs and bent them frog like to either side of the upright stake. That seemed an unnecessary insult but not one to which he could find any legal objection. It was from that point he reminded himself that the soldiers’ task from here on out was to be looking outwards.
Even so he was aware that Marilyn was knelt at the foot of her sister’s cross her hands clasped in prayer about a handful of beads decorated with images of the Pantheon. They clicked as she worked her way through each set of prayers over and over again.
For the first hour Ragborn kept up a tirade of abuse. He was not terribly inventive, some maiming, much murder, an awful lot of sexual abuse and some scatological remarks. He even offered to fuck Marilyn at one point which provoked the only words from Cherry Dav ever heard. “She’s too good for you, your bull cock is only fit for cows an sows.” Ragborn snarled at Cherry something about being a sow herself but he left Marilyn alone after that and Cherry too for that matter. After the third hour he wound down. The three henchmen would occasionally perk up enough to beg for mercy but things were fairly settled at that point.
The summer rain comes in fast in Dryberg. It never stays long but it comes in fast and as often as not hard. You have to be wary of flash floods up in the hills and the mountains, always checking you are not in the likely path of a torrent. The temperature plunged for the three hour downpour and that is likely what did for Cherry. The crowds thinned fast and even the guests in the pavilion soon climbed into those curtain windowed carriages and headed back into Katalina. It took a while for Marilyn to say the words.
“Corporal Laric I think my sister is dead.” It was starkly formal but Dav himself could only be formal so he simply sent for the Coroner. The Doctor of Medicine and Physiks was not so happy with his much prized title at that time of late evening when the revelries in the Capital would have been in full swing but he rolled up on little dog cart pulled by a smallish dragon that ran on two legs and had a set of jaws that looked quite happy to snap up any dog. The man in his round hat and with his formal robes flung on top of what looked to be party clothes stomped grumbling through the mud followed by a servant with a distinct look of south lander about him clutching his medical bag. After some messing about with mirrors and ladders and surgical pins he proclaimed Cherry of no known family quite legally dead.
“Marilyn of Whytehale I release the body of the deceased to you as her Chief Mourner, do you accept this grave responsibility?” Dav intoned the words, Marilyn was meant to make a formal reply but it was all she could do at that point to jerk her head inside her hood. The Priest of the Father made a point of intoning the Solemn Consecration of the Deceased and after a couple of verses the Priest of the Smith also joined in at the top of his lungs.
It seemed slightly odd behaviour until a Quartet of Nuns of the Mother and a pair of Priestesses scurried out of the masked pavilion tent with a small dragon wagon tugged along by diminutive veg gobbler who seemed to have missed a vocation in life drawing racing chariots. A nun took him firmly by the head to slow him to a more suitable progress. The executioners were supposed to have been hanging around for this sort of thing but had buggered off under the cover of the rain. Still a little bribery from Dav and Watch Lieutenant Jenkins decided the Watchmen it was not beneath their honour as licensed goons to lower the cross after all. Jenkins at least had been smart enough to recognise some Court interest had a hand in all of this.
With Cherry departed on her progress to the Temple of the Mother Jenkins himself might have followed but it turned out that Laric of the Yeomanry was the sort to take the whole duty thing actually quite seriously. He would have to wait until tomorrow night to be able to boast in his favourite tavern how he was there.
Come midnight and it seemed that at least two of the henchmen were dead and the third not far off but the Trooper sent to find a Coroner reported that they had all gone to ground. By then the nigh watch had arrived to take charge of matters allowing Dav and Jenkins and their men to hurry eagerly to their own beds. Ragborn woke up enough to hurl abuse and then went back to dying.
The next day Dav tried to summon up the courage to go looking for Marilyn, he guessed she might be at the Temple of the Mother now but he was not sure. His courage ebbed as the day wore on so he mostly focused on some half heated drill with his company. The day after he had formal duties which provided an excuse for ducking the decision again. The next day after that he received a note on scented paper marked from Marilyn. After a swallow of brandy he finally mustered the courage to open it and read.
