The Spy

     "What are you doing with the lord's papers?  You are reading

them!  You are a spy,"

     "No, milady, I wasn't reading them.  I don't k now how to

read."

     "You pretend, but you are a spy!  Guards!  Guards!"  She

drew a dagger from her girdle and backed the frightened maid into a

corner.  Two men-at-arms rushed into the room.  "That slave is a spy.

Take her to the courtyard and remove her clothes.  We'll have the

truth out of her."   The lord's house was not a proper castle.  It was

more of a fortified house, a large hall forming one side of a walled

rectangle, with a gatehouse and tower opposite the hall, stables and

barracks along the other two sides.  A dozen soldiers watched as the

young woman was stripped of her clothing.  In one corner of the

courtyard stood two upright posts, with holes bored in them for ropes

to pass through.

     The lady supervised, while the soldiers bound the prisoner's

wrists and hauled her arms upward and apart, one to each post.  The

strain on her joints increased as her feet left the ground and  her arms

departed from vertical.  She clenched her teeth and tried not to

scream as the force doubled.  "Tell us who is paying you to spy.  You

were bought only weeks ago.  That was no accident.  You were

planted in our household."  The prisoner protested her innocence, so

the lady directed the soldiers in tying ropes to the victim's ankles.

When the ropes were passed though holes in the posts, the soldiers

pulled her legs apart and added more to the strain on her shoulders.

Totally naked, fully exposed to the gaze of everyone in the household

who cared to look, the maid should have experienced shame, but the

pain of taut muscles and joints almost dislocated drove petty

considerations of modesty from her head.

     First, soldiers took turns whipping her with long leather

livestock whips.  One would stand in front of her and one behind,

taking turns laying on the lash.  Sometimes the leather snake would

curl around her body, leaving a welt as long as an arm, but the

soldier soon made a game of making the whip crack, and placing the

uncoiling tip, actually going supersonic, against some tender place,

such as a breast or between her widespread legs.  The cracking whip

invariably broke the skin, and soon she was streaked with blood from

shoulders to knees, but especially over her breasts and buttocks.  The

cumulative effect was to leave the beaten victim half  in shock,

hanging limp and unable to respond as the whips flayed her alive.

The lady told the soldiers to stop, and they threw a bucket of water in

the victim's face to revive her.  The soldiers left her hanging, while

they went for their midday meal.

     In the summer, most cooking was done outdoors, in the

courtyard, where one could roast a whole ox, if need be.  The lady

played with her dagger, raping the maid with the handle.  Then the

lady went over to the cook and came back with a bunch of carrots

and a turnip.   "Tell me who placed you here, and what you were

looking for."  There was no response, so the lady pushed one carrot

into the exposed anus, until only greens were showing.  She did it

again and again, leaving the suspended maid with a bush of carrot

tops like a tail, while her rectum was painfully stretched by the bunch

of carrots.  "And do you know where the turnip goes?"  She put the

tip of the turnip, bigger than a man's fist, between the bruised lower

labia and pushed.  It did not penetrate far.  She pushed harder, finally

pounding with her fist, until the victim's vagina was incredibly

stretched to accommodate the turnip, big as a baby's head.  However,

then the lady let go, the turnip fell out.  She went back to the outdoor

kitchen and returned with a section of tree limb, as thick as her arm

and crudely pointed on each end, as it had been cut with an ax.  She

put one end on the ground as saw that the other end rested against

pubic hair.  Again she pounded the turnip into the too-tight vagina,

but she used the pointed stick to hold it in place, the lower point

embedded in the dirt, the upper point embedded in the turnip.  "You

will not be cut down until you tell what your mission was."   The

maid's answer was incomprehensible, in a croaking voice.  "You

want water?"  Her victim nodded.  The lady summoned two tall

soldiers to fetch buckets of water from the well.   "Pull her head back,

and pour the water down her throat.  Make her drink it all, both

buckets."

     The soldiers had seen the water torture before, and they

forced their victim to swallow until her stomach was more than full,

and her belly was swollen as if in pregnancy.  When they stopped

pouring, the victim spewed her stomach contents and hung there,

coughing and gagging.  The lady nodded, and the soldiers repeated

the torture twice more.  "This can go on all afternoon.  Tell me what

I want to know."

     "I cannot. I am innocent."

     The prisoner's breasts were about the level of the lady's chin.

"Fetch the barber," she said.  "Tell him to bring his surgical

instruments, needles and thread.  You, heat some irons in the fire."

While the barber stood by, the lady played with a red hot iron,

singing the pubic hair, searing some of the still-bleeding whip

wounds, which elicited loud screams but did staunch the flow of

blood.  Between the widespread thighs, the now naked genital cleft

gaped open, the labia spread wide by the turnip.  Forward of the

turnip was a triangular area of gleaming pink.  The lady probed with

her finger tip, satisfying herself that she understood the anatomy of

the prisoner's sex.  Then, with a freshly heated iron, she laid the hot

metal between the spread labia, boiling, then burning, the hidden

nubbin which is the focus of sexual pleasure.

     Next to receive her attention was the right breast.  With her

left hand and the barber's pinchers, she grasped the nipple and pulled

it toward her, drawing the breast into a conical shape.  With her right

hand and her sharp dagger, she cut through the skin above the nipple

and horizontally on either side to the chest wall, as if she meant to

halve an apple.  The blade made a semicircular cut along the crease

where the breast met the chest.  There was some blood, but the hot

iron stopped the worst of it.  With care and determination, she peeled

the skin off the lower part of the breast,  pulling it forward until it

hung free from the still attached nipple. Exposed was the creamy fat

of the inner breast.  Soldiers kept bringing heated irons as the torturer

literally melted away the fatty tissue, using the dagger to cut through

the ducts and suspensary ligaments which had given the breast its

shape.  While the barber held the nipple up, she cut and burned most

of what had been within the skin.  Then she cut off the areola and

nipple, leaving only a flap of skin and gleaming fascia where the

mammary gland had been.  "Sew that skin to close the wound," said

the lady, stepping back to admire her work.  When the barber was

through stitching, there was hardly any blood, and the prisoner's

chest was smooth and flat, like a boy's, except there was no nipple.

     Still the spy did not cooperate, so the left breast had to go.

This time, the lady cut off the nipple first and then operated through

the hole, melting and scooping out the fatty tissue while the more or

less intact skin contained the bleeding.  When all that was left was an

empty bag of skin, the barber sewed it up and trimmed away the

surplus skin.  On the left side, therefore, instead of a long curved line

of stitches, there was only a little laced-up pucker where the nipple

might have been, had the prisoner been a boy.

     There were other things to do, such as the meal in the great

hall, with some revelry following, so the mutilated maid was left

stretched between the poles, limbs extended painfully, cunt and ass

distended by vegetables, the places of sexual pleasure utterly

destroyed, her breasts scraps of fat in the dirt, already food for rats.

The sharpened shaft of wood still pressed the turnip against her

cervix, displacing her womb.  Night fell, and while sleep was

impossible, her mind wandered in a sort of delirium of pain and grief,

mourning for her lost womanhood.

     Then in the dark, she heard a familiar voice.  "Did you find

what you were sent to find?"

     "Yes, the former lord did not die in the Holy Land.  His

younger brother had him imprisoned in his cousin's dungeon, and has

illegally assumed his title.  Please, cut me down and take me away

from here."  Her accomplice sized up the situation.  He might once

have loved this maid, but she held no allure for him now, a maid no

longer.  He reached up  and loosened the ropes which held her writsts.

"No, no.  Release the feet first."  He let the ropes slip a bit more.

all the captive's weight was supported by the stake in her vagina.

She felt the turnip split open, expanding inside her as the wooden

point penetrated it, penetrated the fundus of her vagina, and began to

pierce her intestines.  Her almost useless tortured arms tried

tried to stop her inevitable  slide down the sharpened shaft.

She knew she would be dead before dawn.