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Ch 22
Hung
She was right!
It was not the first time Manu nailed someone to a cross, or to another device. He knew that any hesitation on his part would only cause more suffering, to the helpless victim. That the victim who, arms extended, was his one true love, really did not make a difference.
But it did.
He waited, hammer upraised, not hearing the ovation coming from the stands, by the men who, foolishly, thought he was just prolonging the tension, and the fear of the victim. Lila, her heart beating an irregular, rapid, tattoo, in her ears, opened her eyes, unwillingly drawn to look at the nail, dimpling the skin on her wrist. She noticed his hand, holding the cruel iron spike steady, even the small hairs, on the back of his fingers; hairs that she liked to taste with her tongue. Lila knew that, whatever else, Manu was not delaying for her benefit; she looked up at his tortured face and saw the tears, crawling down his cheeks, dropping, slowly, from his chin.
And then the hammer came down.
Her world became white. White, as in the white explosion of pain that replaced her arm. The white wave of pain that crashed into her, only to return in an even stronger wave, shook her entire body, bound as it was to the cross, by her arms and knees.
Her shriek of horror, scattered the birds from the trees, and drew an unheard ovation from the crowd. Manu’s strike was true, strong. It drove the nail cleanly through her wrist, and partly into the wood. Well bound at the palm and forearm, her arm could not move, so the nail remained stuck, on the wood. Only two more, well placed, strokes of the hammer and the wide nail head was flush with the skin of her wrist. Only a few drops of blood had splattered from the wound, so fast had the nailing been, and so well sealed was the wound by the bulk of the nail.
The second nail went into her wrist, while she still writhed and screamed from the agony of the first. Rather than giving her time to recover, Manu moved rapidly to the other arm and in three or four heavy blows, he had the poor girl nailed by her wrists to the crossbeam.
Now he had to wait. To fulfill his promise to her, he needed to untie her legs; he could not do that until she regained, at least some, control of herself. He would have preferred to just nail her feet now and be done with it, while her brain suffered under sensory overload; the pain of her new nailing lost in the prior horror.
But he had promised.
She knew not how long she screamed, how long she writhed, in agony. In the end, it was not of her will that she regained control of her body; it was sheer exhaustion. Her lungs, burning from the effort, her throat, raw from the screams, and her muscles, cramping in protest, all of them, at the same time, gave up.
She lay, upon the wooden board, defeated.
He knelt at her side.
“Forgive me, I should have done,” he quailed at saying ‘nailed’, “your feet, while you were screaming; but you made me promise…”
Lila looked at him, her eyes empty, now lying motionless, she looked down one arm, then the other; she only realized now that both her wrists were now nailed to the wooden crossbeam. She looked back at his face, her memory returning, as the worst lashes of agony receded, slightly.
“Please, do it to me, once more.”
Manu and Aisha started to untie her legs, bound at the knees to the cross. The crowd craned their necks forward to see what was going on.
Aisha had to coax Manu’s member into erection with her mouth, and it took her a while to achieve this. Manu, standing by the cross that held his beloved Lila, tried to close his eyes and imagine Lila, with him, in the Morocco of his youth. Somehow, this figment of his imagination did the trick, and as he saw her, and their children romping around, he lifted her legs, and entered her.
She held back a cry of pain as he lifted and spread her thighs, any movement, even one as slight as that, bringing new waves of pain from her skewered arms. She could not hold back her whimpers when he started thrusting in her. She wondered why, suddenly, his face was so peaceful. She felt the warmth of his seed inside her, and felt it drip, when he finally withdrew.
Where the feet were to be nailed, a foot long piece of wood had been firmly attached to the cross; this rectangular piece was triangular in cross section and would insure that, once nailed, the knees of the victim would fall to the sides, exposing her genitals. After placing Lila’s feet on the oblique surface, he tied them to the cross by the ankles and hammered a U shaped clamp around each big toe, into the wood. This would not only help to keep the feet in place, for the nailing, but also provide some extra support for her feet.
He located the place on the first foot, the right one, between the bone of the first and second metatarsal. He could not bear to look at her again. It was bad enough that he had to hear her screams when he hammered the nail in place, as hard as he could, against the rough, unyielding wood.
Then, he had to do it again.
“Aisha help me untie her,” he yelled at the slave girl who had watched, numb, the proceedings. “Hurry!”
They both frantically undid the bindings that had helped immobilize her arms and legs during the nailing. Aisha wanted to ask what the hurry was, but Manu anticipated her question.
“I want to get her hung up, while she is still screaming, she will feel less pain that way.”
She was still screaming when he and a volunteer from the crowd pushed the cross upright, into the hole that had been prepared for it.
Lila thought that there could be no worse pain than the nailing of her feet. The sick thump, when the cross fell into its hole, and the sudden jerk on her wrists and feet, as they took the whole weight of her body, brought her to new heights of agony. That she did not scream even more loudly was not due to any presence of mind on her part; it was simply lack of air.
She continued to scream for long minutes, each scream, a little weaker than the last. After perhaps half an hour hanging from the cross, her head fell on her chest, and she was silent. Only the sound of her strained breathing broke the stillness of the air.
The crowd cheered wildly. Some of the soldiers now returned to their posts, others sought refreshment elsewhere. They would return, on and off, as the evening progressed to witness the victim’s struggle on the cross.
Manu stood, with Aisha at his side, his expression grim, contemplating his handiwork. The cross was not too high, only 6 and a half feet tall; as opposed to the old penal crosses used by the Romans, where the intent was for the hanging criminal to be visible for long distances, this one was meant for a more intimate execution. The victim could be seen, up close, touched, and the least of her gasps for breath heard, in vivid clarity. Al-Mansour waddled off to eat his belated lunch, a scantily dressed slave girl following close behind him.
Aisha saw the pretty young girl following her master, the role she used to perform before being “loaned” to Manu for the duration. Only a short time ago, the sight of another girl performing her duties, would make her feel threatened, she would fear losing the sheik’s favor. Now, she watched her pass without changing her expression. She noted her presence, as she could notice a bird, picking out seeds on the ground. She resumed watching Lila’s mute struggle on the cross.
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