Madeleine Succumbs to the Cross
Carefully he begins to guide me away from the post.
Supporting me but letting me take my own steps.
I feel every pebble, every grain of sand beneath my feet.
As I move, I begin to feel the searing pain of the cuts and welts.
As I approach, I see that cruel dancing line.
I'm so much immersed in my own terror but I see theirs too.
All of them there crucified.
Soon all of
us.
Their names come easy now to me, but with genuine sorrow.
Eulalia. Messaline. Thessela. Barbaria. Emily.
Soon me.
Soon we will be together. Up.
And then maybe beyond. Where and if we go after.
And my soon is now.
Because it's there.
It burns in my eyes, beckoning.
It grew up somewhere in the woods, for me.
It was meant for something else than those that grew beside it.
They cut it and took it and shaped it and brought it here.
The grain of its wood for the fiber of my body.
I hold Madeleine close as she sees her cross but I can feel that she sees more. The seed that lay on the forest floor and, unlike the ones that failed and rotted, germinated to become a seedling, a sapling so flexible in the breeze until, over so many years, became a tree of strong trunk and branches. A growing thing nurtured by earth and rain. Did it know it was destined for this? To become one with her joined together by those wrought iron spikes.
Turn Sister. Your bed is there. Lie down. Rest a moment while you can. Like the tree that it was it will raise you up soon enough.
Pilus leads and turns me and I spill myself upon it.
There are three of the monks there now.
Two at the top end of the cross, with two nails and a hammer between them.
One at the foot, with the same tools.
One each of the two at top seizes me by the arm and together they hold me locked firm.
They'll start with my feet.
They one at bottom looks to Pilus.
He, to me.
Pilus passes my nod on to the executioner.
Begin.
I look down as the toads seize Madeleine's arms, locking her in place. Can't they see, feel, that she lies there willingly. My glance tells her, "they are ready Sister." I do not need to ask her if she is ready. I know that she is prepared, that she accepts, even welcomes, my role in this but her nod is her affirmation.
What would delay mean? A pause for me but nothing for Madeleine.
It is time. "Begin!" At my command it is Madeleine, not the monk crouched at her feet, who responds first.
I place my right foot where I know it needs to go, the monk quickly binds it.
He places the first nail where he knows it needs to go.
I want to look. I need to see.
But as the executioner raises the hammer I find I can't.
I look up to where the hammer is, I get my lungs full of air and I start screaming already before it drops.
Everyone will hear the skip in my voice as the nail goes in.
But not through.
More terrible than the pain itself, is the feeling of that rough, edged, foreign thing inside my bones, forcing them apart, until they burst.
It strangles my scream into choking heaving sobs.
The fiend continues, but just lets the hammer fall from half-high instead of swinging with force.
The nail goes against the sole of my foot from the inside, delaminating the skin and pitching it out like a tent.
My throat constricts.
I'd gouge my eyes if I could but the other two hold me so tight.
It's like time stops and I can look and I see... sudden fear in the executioner's eye.
Pilus has wrested the hammer from him, almost breaking his wrist.
"Enough of this".
He gives the fiend a withering look and the toad crawls away.
Grim-faced but determined, Pilus drives the nail fully through with one blow.
I go limp but breathe in deep.
"Useless bastard. You are never a Phlebas who knows his task. Give me that hammer!" I wrest it from him roughly, deliberately twisting, hurting him in some small punishment for his incompetance. A single blow. Determined to do this quickly, as cleanly as I can. Hard, ringing, blocking the wracking sobs that wound me.
I touch Madeleine's left ankle, then hold it firmly to feed her strength through my hands and my voice.
'Sister Madeleine', he says, and puts his hand on my other ankle.
The cramping tension in my legs releases and I let him bind my left foot beside the right.
The second nail goes through and into the wood with one precise, powerful, merciful blow.
Another hit and it's firm. I'm thrown around with the shock but it's so quick.
Strike hard Pilus. Hard and clean. Through her flesh and her bone. A second blow. Before she knows. Pinned now. The pain and shock rock her but it is done.
It is time for her wrists now. I would nail these, too, and be sure it is clean but the Cardinal has had enough of my work. He would rather these toads and the chance they will miss-hit or worse. All I can do it threaten, force them to act as one. "Bind her wrists tightly. Strike as one." They know me. They will.
Pilus looks at the two holding me down.
He tosses his hammer over to them, so now each of them has one.
'Both wrists at once', he says.
'Do it quick and clean or you'll regret it'.
They obey, and rapidly rope down my wrists.
They place the nails.
I take an enormous deep breath and, light-headed, I prepare to scream.
Lightning strikes.
Instead of crying out though I bite deep down into my tongue and my mouth fills up with blood.
My hands have ceased to be things of my own.
My arms end in stumps of agony.
My hands, my fingers, might as well be dead branches of wood.
They belong more to the cross than me.
My voice is smothered, drowning in that bitter hot flood.
Madeleine is one with her cross now. Shoulders men. Lift! Steady, steady. Lift! Once more. Brace yourselves. The slot. And lower. Carefully you bastards.
Now the wedges. Give me that damned mallet. Drive them firm.
The cross rises.
My wrists are stumps and my hands replaced with dead branches.
My voice drowned in my own blood.
I lurch forward on the slanting beam.
Open my mouth to scream.
What comes forth is a red-choked gurgle.
Strings and sprays of blood.
Arcing out and spattering onto the supervisor of my crucifixion.
Dripping right onto his face.
Onto Pilus.
The Cardinal roars in laughter and points.
But Pilus, he's looking up at me and our eyes meet and he understands what mine are saying.
'Sorry about that... after all you've done for me'.
"Incorrigible!" cries the Cardinal.
"But her blood probably washes out easier than this infernal ink!"
"Let's have at her with the red hot pokers!" - one of the monk-toads urges.
Pilus raises his hand and there's some authority in him that silences them.
Then he produces a white cloth and wipes himself clean.
What he doesn't do though ... is cast it aside in disgust.
A curse from the Cardinal. I stare at the monk. Yes you toad. You would curry favour with red robe wouldn't you? Not on my watch. I turn my gaze to that stained shadow of a man in red. I raise my hand. You gave me this task. I am in control here. Not you. Silence.
Thrust into the waistband of my trousers are the remains of her scapular, her symbolic apron. It already shows stains of her sweat and blood but is still white. Still pure. I am in no hurry to scrub myself clean.
This is no stain. It is not the ink that symbolised the Cardinal's blackened soul. Her blood on my whips bind her to me a surely as a chain. Her blood on my clothing and on my skin tempers the chain's links.
I wipe some of Madeleine's blood away but there is time, later, when all is done to clean more. Her scapular is not a rag to be thrown away but a part of that bond.
I look up to the woman on her cross....
Our eyes meet one last time.
Thank you, I send him.
I nod. I understand Madeleine. I understand.
I shake my head violently.
Up up up up uuuuup.
The most urgent drive now to be up.
I push with all I have from out of my legs and hips, guiding my upper body with my arms, getting my shoulders up over the patibulum, and I throw my head way back.
All my hair heavy and matted with sweat and blood goes back over the crossbeam with a big wet flap.
With that as counterweight I rest my head looking straight up.
Up into the blue and cruel sky - empty, great and godless.
Dizzy, falling into it.
And suddenly, I see snowflakes tumbling.
Or is that ash settling.
Or my sight failing.
Dancing dots and squirming.
Slowly now sinking back, my head forward, my hair a falling curtain.
With merciful caress, it folds around me, the velvet cloak of forgetfulness.
Darkness.
Pitch- and soot- and jet-black... night-dark... obsidian.
Darkness.
I never knew there were so many kinds of it.
Inside twists a silver thread and snaps.
Darkness.
Rolling in, closing, merging with, dissolving me.
.
Pilus looks up to the woman stretched out lifeless on the cross.
It has been so difficult to watch Sister Madeleine in her dance. But watch I must. As she seems to slip away to her final night I allow my head to bow and stand alone in my thoughts.
I look up again at the naked body that is all that remains of Madeleine, hanging from the nails driven deep into the fibres of what was once, too, a living breathing thing. Life seems to have gone from both.
Long moments pass, then a deep rasp and rattle out of her chest and throat.
With that wracking spasm, the rhythm of her breath returns.
She is not done. Not yet. Life clings deep inside her.
Some treacherous instinct of the flesh has decided it's too soon for release.
She is wrapped in unconsciousness, but nothing can hide deep enough to escape the pain of the cross.
Soon that agony will probe far enough to wake her once again,
to return to her ordeal,
but for now,
she rests.
And while she breathes Pilus cannot leave.
