Part 4: A Roman Crucifixion
Chapter 10: Nailed to a Roman Cross
catherine
Craning my neck to look out over my breasts, I stared in horrified fascination as the shank of the final nail disappeared into my foot, one agonizing hammer blow at a time and one scream at a time, the rough iron grating against raw flesh and bone, wedging itself into the wound until the last blow drove its head down almost against the top of my foot.
I sobbed in agony as they began removing the bloody ropes that had held my feet in place and were no longer needed. The only things that held my weight now were the four nails that pierced my wrists and feet. The pain was like nothing I’d ever imagined, pounding, throbbing, making my head swim!
The pain in my feet! I’ve got to get off of my feet! I thought, desperate for some relief, even though now there was nothing I could do that would not hurt like hell.
Irrationally, Katy Perry’s modulated voice in that old song played again in my head: There’s no going back!
The cross had obsessed me for longer than I could remember, and now it truly possessed me. And there was no going back. I knew that I was going to die here, on this cross.
Yes, but this is only the beginning. This is where you’ll die, but maybe only after three or four days of agony.
I slipped lower, shivered when the point of the sedile touched my pussy, considered that for a few seconds, then pushed my hips forward and allowed my body to sag downward. It was when my arms grew taut and I was forced to put all of my weight on the nails in my wrists again that I learned how agonizing that would be, worse than it had been at first, excruciating.
I lifted up, settled back several times, thinking it might make it easier if I shifted my weight from the nails in my feet to my wrists slowly, desperately, but nothing worked. Finally, I had to give up, groaning loudly as the full force of my body’s weight pulled my wounded wrists down hard against the nails, trying force myself to hang, take the pain, not use my legs, let them rest.
This is what it feels like to be crucified on a Roman cross, I thought. This is what I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember. I was born for this. This is my destiny.
“This is my destiny,” I moaned softly, not realizing I’d said it out loud.
The executioner’s helper who now offered me a dripping sponge laughed and said, “It sure is! Just like it’s the destiny of all of these other crowbait crucified here with you, Maia!”
I sucked from the bad-smelling sponge, hesitated when I realized that it wasn’t water, but something that tasted like vinegar and something else, a little sweet but acidic at the same time.
“What?” I moaned.
“It’s posca, asshole! I drink it myself. It’ll keep your strength up!” The man said.
It was all I was going to get, so I immediately sucked more from the sponge. He dipped it in his bucket and gave me another drink. I knew that wasn’t mercy; they wanted me to last as long as possible before I weakened and died.
“Of course I don’t drink mine out of an old toilet sponge. Any asshole who’d go and get themselves crucified deserves to drink from a sponge that tastes of everyone else’s asshole!” He said.
I gagged, swallowed, tried to stifle my revulsion, tried to hold the stuff down. That was the least of my problems.
“Who… Wh-what did you call me?” I asked him.
“It’s right there on your titulus, of course, slave! “MAIA FVGITIVA” – Maia the runaway slave! Just didn’t run far enough to escape Roman justice, did you? Where did you think you’d go?”
I searched my mind through the agony. What was I thinking? Sweat was running in my eyes. I shook my head, tried to blink it away. “I don’t know. I had to get away… anywhere.”
Maia, that’s who I am, I realized. That dream where I was called cat, it seemed so real, and that confused me. But this is real. This cross, these nails, those are real.
“So no plan, just what, slip away at the market, run as fast as you can? And you a shapely young blonde-haired girl with a face, tits and ass that all the men would look at and remember? And that Gaulish accent? Might as well have hung a sign around your neck that said ‘crucify me’!” He laughed.
He doesn’t know how close he is to the truth, I thought. The only thing I didn’t do to get caught was the sign.
My past was coming back to me; it was only that the dream that had confused me some.
He picked up his bucket and moved to the Nubian girl crucified next to me and offered her a drink. She sucked long and loudly from the sponge without any hesitation, desperately trying to get all she could. Like me, sweat was dripping off of her, our strength dripping away with it.
The pain in my wrists, arms and shoulders was getting steadily worse. It kept me squirming and moving, trying to find some relief. And then I threw my head back and groaned as hard muscle spasms seized first one shoulder, and then the other, gripping them in a vise. I was writhing, searching for some way to ease that pain, but my struggling was aggravating the agony in my wrists as well.
On top of everything else, once again I was having to push every breath out now to make room for the next. I fought back a rising panic, feeling like there were hands tightening around my throat, slowly strangling me.
I was going to have to raise myself on the cross soon.
Joe
cat screamed as she bore down on her feet, pushing herself upward on the cross. She screamed again and again as she slowly inched higher, struggling to push and pull herself up.
“Ok, just trying to cover all our bases here. She couldn’t be putting much weight on those nails, could she?” Doc said thoughtfully. “I know she’s going to put a little weight on them, but it should be very little. Do you think the ropes are stretching and letting more of her weight go onto the nails?”
“I don’t see how!” I replied. “I stretched those ropes in the barn for weeks, ran them back and forth the length of the barn, up high, out of the way, and hung about five hundred pounds on the end. I can’t take all of the stretch out, because then they’d end up hard and stiff!”
“She has to be feeling the agony of different nails than those, then,” Doc said. “I’m just trying to be sure we’re not being fooled somehow.”
We both watched cat’s screaming progress upward for a moment.
“You know,” Doc added, “if she were pulling against those nails in her wounds, we should see some blood where the wounds would gap away from the nails on the bottom side where there’s no weight. Can’t see the wounds themselves because of those big washers, but there’s no blood!”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“She’s on that cross in Rome,” Doc said.
“Yes, I believe she is,” I said.
We stood and contemplated that as Doc absently fiddled with his tablet, looking at different screens.
“Hmm!” He said, “this is cooler than the other side of the pillow! This display interprets the meaning of the brain activity we’re seeing by comparing it against a database of fMRI data so it shows levels of pain, fear, visual activity, other stuff… and erotic stimulation, oh that’s good!” He grinned.
“Really?” I said, impressed.
“Yeah, look at this moving bar graph!” He angled the screen toward me. “That’s what cat’s brain is doing right now. And I can switch to this graph…” He touched an icon at the bottom of the screen. “And it’ll show me all those things graphed over time, so I can see how much they’re changing!”
“Well I’ll be damned!” I said, “This is really amazing! You can see a record of where her fear climbed right before each nail, and then her pain spiked… Wow! Her pain is up close to the top continuously now!”
“Yeah, that scale wasn’t designed to measure this kind of pain. Probably have to zoom it out a bit to keep the biggest spikes on the screen.”
“Yeah, so much pain and she’s just begun her journey,” I said, “I keep wondering how this will affect her mind.”
“Hey Andrew!” Doc called, and Andrew came over. “Good job with those nails!”
“Thanks,” Andrew said, “I didn’t know how well that would go, to be honest. The first nail was the hardest. No matter your fantasies, it’s a lot different when you’re actually doing that, driving nails into a living human being. Especially someone you know and care about. If I didn’t know beyond any doubt that this is what she really wants, and that we can fix her afterward, no way I could or would do it.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Shows you’re a human being and not a psycho! I’d never let her do this if I thought she’d end up with any permanent injuries either.”
“Andrew,” Doc said, “could you go ahead and hang the bMRI on the back of her cross?
“Sure, got it right here, just take me a sec.” Andrew replied as he reached down the front of his Roman tunic and pulled the bMRI unit out and turned on the display, studying it for a second. It looked like an ordinary cell phone, about three millimeters thick. “Ok, shows that it’s running off of the wireless power here.”
“Ok, connection’s still good,” Doc said. “Looks fine, go ahead and hang it, then check that it’s got a lock on that microtarget on the back of her head.”
“Ok.” Andrew replied, then went around to the back of cat’s cross, reached up high, pressed the unit against the back of the upright and pulled down. His motion confirmed to me that he was using Gecko tape to stick it up there. Pull down and it locks against any surface just like a lizard’s foot on glass, using Van der Waal’s forces at the molecular level. Lift up and it comes right off, no adhesive, no residue. Way better and stronger than duct tape!
“That’s a great looking cross you built, by the way,” Doc said. “Rugged looking, just like one the Romans would have made! You just shaved the bark off of that stipes, and the patibulum is suitably barbaric, round and only flattened on its face where her hands are fixed. Did you cut the trees for that yourself?”
“Yeah, a couple of small white oak trees from back in the woods behind the house right after we knew what we were going to do, about four months ago. I cut the pieces to length, shaved the bark off with a draw knife, sealed the ends so they wouldn’t split and crack, then let them season until last week. I split the timber off on that side to flatten it, then I used a broad axe to smooth it,” I said, “just like people have been using forever for that.”
“It ought to feel like the real thing to her back and ass! No nails or bolts. How the hell did you do that?”
“That’s called a dovetail notch. Lots of people, including the Romans used to use that for all kinds of stuff. Very quick and easy to make with just a saw and a timber framer’s chisel, slips together and locks down tight, no wobbling. It’s tapered, so it works down tighter as she struggles. You’d have to knock it apart with a hammer later.”
“Well, she makes quite a picture up there, beautiful blonde, smooth, sinuous, sweaty body against that rough, rugged wood.”
cat had raised herself up high. Everyone was still watching her in silence, fascinated by the sight of her sweating, straining body writhing and twisting in agony as she struggled. She let out a pain-filled groan from time to time, but mostly she was drawing in one deep breath after the other. Trying to make the most of her time for as long as she was able to bear the pain in her feet to hold herself up.
Even with the crowd quiet, the sound effects of the place of execution went on. Crows cawed noisily, there were crowd sounds, moans and groans of anguish, distant sounds of wagon wheels, an occasional dog barking.
