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Broken On The Wheel

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He posted under a “jdoe 1971” alias here for a few years before leaving. Disagreements with one one the mods. No points for guessing who. He posts mainly on gimp, I’ve seen him on dolcettish, and he just recently joined the new Visions of darkness. Great artist, loves the Witcher.
 
He posted under a “jdoe 1971” alias here for a few years before leaving. Disagreements with one one the mods. No points for guessing who. He posts mainly on gimp, I’ve seen him on dolcettish, and he just recently joined the new Visions of darkness. Great artist, loves the Witcher.
Now you come to mention it, that does come back to me, I thought he'd been around here at one time.
 
Illustration from the book "Mystères de l'Inquisition et autres sociétés secrètes en Espagne" (Mysteries of the Inquisition and other secret societies in Spain) by Victor de Fereal. Artist: unknown, based on a work by René de Moraine.

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I noticed the severed hand, and wondered why that would be in an inquisition torture. A heretic and a thief perhaps? An interesting piece and thanks for posting.
 
I noticed the severed hand, and wondered why that would be in an inquisition torture. A heretic and a thief perhaps? An interesting piece and thanks for posting.
This work is a novel set in the time of the Inquisition (readable in Google books if you're interested, but it's over 500 boring pages in French!).
Here's a translation of the sentence: "And whereas, in the perpetration of this crime, there was a long premeditation, the court, in accordance with the laws of the Kingdom, condemns the said Paula to be broken alive on the wheel and then quartered. And because of the parricide, to have her right hand cut off and burned by the hand of the executioner."

In this book, there are many engravings, including these:

Capture.JPGCapture1.JPG
 
A WALK TO TORTURE AND DEATH

The coarse rope snatched against her wrists, almost toppling her forward, but she managed to kick a bare foot out in front of her and keep from falling. The rider on his horse seemed totally disinterested in whether the nude women trailing behind him was able to keep up, or whether she would complete her journey dragged along the road.

Marianne could not believe she was going to die, still in shock from her sentencing, when the summary court martial had arbitrarily singled her out for punishment along with the men. And shock upon shock continued to overwhelm her, as when she was stripped naked in the square of her own town, her very friends and neighbors peeking from windows to see her shame, and now she was being carelessly hauled away to some unknown barbaric fate.

Her breasts bounced wildly in the effort to maintain the quick pace, and Marianne was embarrassed to see them flop so much, but there was nothing she could do to stop them. At least few townsfolk had followed her death march, unwilling to endorse the caprices of this foreign invading army, and perhaps fearful for their own lives, as well.

A rock in the road tripped her and Marianne fell heavily, unable to get back to her feet as the insistent rope pulled her along. Her tender nipples and breasts felt the worst of the pebbles and other cruel debris that ripped and tore along her entire naked body, causing her to scream and beg for the mounted soldier to stop so she could regain her feet. But he remained supremely indifferent to her plight, and the best she could do was roll herself over, so that her soft buttocks took the brunt of the clawing assault.

At last she stopped, and the first thing her senses detected, after the waves of pain had subsided a little, was hideous screaming. While rough hands hauled her to her feet and unlashed her hands from the horse, she reflexively sought out the source of those screams, but when she found it her knees buckled, and she had to be supported lest she collapse back to the ground.

Four wagon wheels atop long poles filled the sky. Each wheel bore a naked man, screaming and moaning in the throes of the utmost agony, calling out for mercy and a quick death that would not be granted them. Crows circled overhead, and a few were already making tentative swoops at the defenseless bodies offered up to them. And there on the ground was a fifth unused wheel.

Pleading with tear-filled eyes, Marianne was half-carried to an open area and thrown down on the ground. Her wrists and ankles were immediately secured with ropes tied to stakes driven into the ground, and she felt the tension build as her body was stretched into the shape of the letter X. Her delicate womanhood was splayed open for all to see, and she was vaguely aware of a grinning wall of soldiers surrounding her on all sides, but she had been nude for so long, and her reeling mind so preoccupied with her ultimate fate, that she hardly felt the increase in shame.

But there would be no mistaking the increase in pain her privates were about to give her. Six soldiers, selected by their commander as the bravest in the recent action that had taken the town, would have the privilege of mounting the woman. The first stepped up and eagerly unfastened his codpiece, his pre-stiffened rod applauded by his friends and hooted by the jealous. He was unashamed before his comrades, all inured to living and loving together on the march. Nor were some of his fellows inhibited from letting their own codpieces fall, so they could enjoy his pleasure vicariously, despite a few townspeople hovering around the perimeter. The soldier quickly positioned himself and entered with a single thrust that made Marianne howl, seeming to confirm his envied shout that she was a virgin.

Marianne was helpless against the onslaught, held fast in the posture most dear to every lustful man’s fantasies. She could not even avert her face from his fetid breath and rotten teeth, for he held her head firm between his calloused hands, his elbows squeezing in on her naked breasts, so that he could further enflame his passion with a direct gaze into her terrified eyes. And when he was spent there were five more just like him.

And then came a final defiler, the executioner himself, who thought at first his position too lofty to lie in the dirt, but who had been seductively recruited by the pulsing drumbeat of manly grunts and womanly cries. His thrusting passion should have built more slowly, due to the slackened grip and oozing residue caused by the previous six. But the exciting image of the horrors he was about to inflict on this woman quivering beneath him brought his peak too quickly, obliging him to deceive his audience with as many soft thrusts as had been hard, to preserve his masculine pride.

Quickly hiding his depleted weapon from sight, the executioner ordered his assistant to slide timbers under Marianne’s ankles, knees and hips, and also under her wrists, elbows and shoulders. She whimpered as the rough beams drove splinters deep into her skin, and at the realization that her real ordeal was drawing nearer.

Her prone view of blue sky and clouds was suddenly eclipsed as a wooden wagon wheel loomed over her face, and she wondered if it would fall onto her head and end her life quickly. But the executioner was merely obliging her with a view of the instrument of her own destruction, as was customary in executions of all kinds. She saw the wheel carried down to her feet, then she closed her eyes to pray, and tremble, and wait.

Marianne heard the right shin bones splinter before she felt any pain, and for a fraction of a second the first sharp sensation might have been manageable, endurable, until its echoes began to reverberate all through her leg, building into an exploding crescendo of roaring agony. And the shock of realizing that her worst fears were not bad enough, and learning too late why this punishment turned even brave men into babbling cowards, destroyed any resolve she might have had to remain defiant in the face of her enemy. And so she shrieked and cried without reservation, panting and gasping, trying to expel some of the searing pain with her very breath, and tearfully imploring God and all His Saints to rescue her from a torture too monstrous to be endured.

Yet endured it must be, it would be, for there was no way to move, no free hand to deflect the wheel’s descent nor even to rub away the hurt. And Marianne felt new hurt upon hurt as the executioner ruthlessly pushed her shin back and forth with his hands, to confirm both bones were completely broken, setting off fresh explosions of pain and howling.

The wheel destroyed her right thighbone next, and Marianne finally slipped away into a blessed faint. But she had not been brought there to sleep through her execution, and a sputtering mouthful of doctored wine soon urged her back to a world of suffering. So she did not miss having her kneecap and the joint beneath it pounded into splinters by the iron-tired wheel, nor her entire left leg likewise ruined. Both legs were streaked with blood, for bone splinters invariably broke through the skin, and the executioner had to use the wheel judiciously to prevent major hemorrhages that could give his subject an early release from her ordeal.

Victims of the wheel would be lucky to be moaning in a semi-conscious stupor by the time their arms were being smashed, but Marianne’s pathetic pleas for mercy meant she still felt every distinct crunch of her bones, every hammering of nerve and tissue. Credit for her enduring suffering was naturally given to the skill of the executioner, who received generous cheers from the hundreds of surrounding soldiers at Marianne’s every screech, though she herself hardly heard the accolades, isolated behind a wall of agony. But the executioner himself knew from experience that women, contrary to common belief, were frequently more resistant to fainting and delirium than men, so that ironically the so-called weaker sex was often doomed to suffer more than the allegedly tougher men.

Marianne’s shoulders were also crushed, and then the wheel was brought over her pelvis. Her hips were both smashed, and then her pubic bone, which brought some sighs from a few soldiers, expressing regret for the symbolic loss of a man’s greatest pleasure site. The executioner had no regrets, however, having now twice drawn exquisite pleasure from that dark triangle, both from within and from without, and a stain could be seen on his bulging codpiece.

He directed his assistants to untie Marianne’s ropes, and to reposition her hands and feet on the ankle blocks, so that he could crush even these small and inoffensive bones. Her howls suggested this pain was the worst of all, perhaps because of the great number of bones pulverized all at once, or because of the many nerves there. The wheel’s revolting work done, every bone in Marianne’s body was now broken, save ribs, spine and skull.

The executioner directed his assistants to place the wheel horizontally onto a two-foot tall post, which fit into the hub and allowed the wheel to rotate, like a turntable. Next each assistant roughly grabbed one of Marianne’s hands and feet, lifting her up and lugging her over to the wheel.

Her frantic shrieks startled the spectators, despite their having heard her screaming continuously for nearly an hour. Lifting her by hands and feet had stretched her rubbery limbs, separating every broken bone all at once, magnifying all her previous pain a thousand-fold. The blinding pain spared no part of her body, an electrifying assault of unimaginable agony. Fortunately Marianne passed into unconsciousness before she reached the wheel, as did almost every victim of this inhuman mode of transport.

She was placed face-up across the wheel and revived with more drugged wine. Someone in the crowd shouted out a request that she be laid face down upon the wheel, to better advertise her gender when raised upon the pole, and other voices endorsed the novel idea. The executioner considered the request for a moment, and in a rare example of good humor agreed to order his assistants to turn Marianne over onto her stomach. The repositioning cost her dearly, but it did not deter the men, since her only remaining purpose in life was to suffer as much as humanly possible.

The small wheel now framed her torso, from the shoulders to just below her buttocks, while her shapeless arms and legs flopped over the rim toward the ground, and her head dropped over the edge. Her bare breasts protruded through the spokes, hanging more obscenely in their visual separation from her body. There was no need to secure her with ropes, since her limbs had lost all power of movement, except for writhing spasms that disguised pain more dreadful than could be imagined.

Now came the part in the execution most horrific to observers, the weaving of the broken limbs through the wooden spokes of the wheel. Marianne’s unorthodox posture called for a special braiding pattern, and the first step was to stretch out her legs by bringing them straight alongside her body, the ankles tugged past the rim near her shoulders, her buttocks pulled unnaturally upward, her anus fully exposed to the sunlight. Her smashed hip joints gave no physical resistance to this impossible pose, but Marianne’s screeches told everyone how reluctant she was to have it done.

Then her legs were folded back and threaded down through the spokes just above her knee, and each leg wrapped a full turn around a spoke, the mangled feet finally dangling below the wheel, a counterpoint to her breasts. The legs were secured with ropes and the executioners turned to her arms.

These were wrapped tightly around the rim and between successive spokes, like corkscrews, and secured with ropes. Marianne’s blood-curdling cries proved her dislike of this operation, too. Now came the last step in the execution, the raising of the wheel onto the pole.

First the wheel was dismounted from the pedestal, and propped upright against it for a few minutes to afford the crowd a final close-up look at the victim. The obscenity of Marianne’s deformed posture, her frightening grimaces and failing cries unleashed a lustful frenzy in some soldiers, who anointed her with a second round of manly essence, which though not as intimately painful as before, was equally debasing.

The wheel was carried horizontally between the executioners like a hideous stretcher, and brought to a vacant 20-foot tall pole, where an assembly of ladders was waiting. They awkwardly hoisted Marianne aloft, every jolt a scream, until the pole was fitted into the wheel’s hub, the completed assembly resembling a macabre umbrella.

Marianne looked down dimly at the ground below, where soldiers stood mocking her, and then she managed to turn her eyes enough to see two of her companions on the wheel, a few feet away. Men she grew up with and knew, now tortured almost beyond recognition, groaning continuously, facing up to the sun, their heads hanging down over the rims upside down, their bloody limbs twisted in ways different from her own, but no less sickening. And she could see one of them had been totally emasculated, no trace of his manhood remaining, and wondered if the others had suffered the same fate. And indeed they had, their amputated genitals being tamped into their own rectums for convenient disposal.

Sweat poured down Marianne’s face and into her eyes, obscuring her vision, a sign both of her immense suffering and the heat of the baking sun. Buzzing insects covered her face, and from their bites and stings she knew they covered her whole body, drawn by the blood. She welcomed a cooling breeze, until it caused the tall, slender pole to begin to sway slightly, shifting her body enough to make her entwined limbs scream in protest at the memory of their breaking. She heard other rising moans and knew the same was happening to the others, although with her shoulders broken she couldn’t move her head to see well, only roll her eyes flooded with sweat and tears.

She was at least able to see the first black crows alight on the men and begin to feed, though only one of their living meals had the energy to scream and protest loudly, and even he shortly lost his voice, so that the birds quickly revisited him. Marianne wondered if crows would visit her, too, but they were already sitting on her rim, and the first pecks told her she was doomed to die by their beaks and claws.

She felt the rude attacks against her anus, and realized how exposed it must be, and felt other probes into her sex. She knew the birds wanted her eyes, but hoped her face down position would protect her. It didn’t. The crows clung to her face, and hair, and the rim itself, and managed to find her eyes. And they found her torn nipples and breasts, dangling beneath the wheel, though even the clever and acrobatic crows could only steal a few pecks at time. It was enough for the soldiers still gathered on the ground below, however, who laughed and cheered at the comic results of their own innovation, softly though, lest they scare off the entertainment.

And so Marianne died after many hours, a cruel amusement for men, and a meal for birds and insects. For all five bodies were left on their wheels to be reduced to bones, and only after the last of the invading army departed did the townspeople cut down the shameful poles and give the few remains respectful Christian burial.
 
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