Alicia was looking up at me with a look of utter anguish upon her face, tears pouring down her cheeks. It’s hard to watch someone you love being treated the way I’d just been treated; harder still when you know it is just about to happen to you as well. And I’d done a bloody useless job of trying to pretend to her that it didn’t hurt.
“Alicia….” I gasped, through clenched teeth. “Alicia!”
“I LOVE YOU!” she shrieked, as they began to drag her towards her cross.
“In the name of the gods, have some humanity! You can’t do… this… to a girl like her! Please! Let her go!”
I was wasting my precious breath. They completely ignored me, as I’d known they would. I heard Marcellinus laughing.
She never once took her eyes from mine as they dragged her down onto her cross, as they pulled her arms outstretched and tied her down.
“ROMAN BASTARDS!!! LOOK AT YOU, YOU COWARDLY CUNTS! SIX OF YOU FOR ONE GIRL!”
That got me a whiplash across my belly, and it got Alicia nowhere.
Helpless, I saw that the spikes they were using on her slender wrists were the same as they’d used on me. Helpless, I watched the hammer rise.
“ALICIA!” The hammer crashed down. I saw the blood spray from the wound the nail made, and the sound she made was an unearthly howl of rage, terror, and dreadful, dreadful pain. I watched her body convulsing with each blow of the mallet, again and again it struck. I flinched with each strike, despite the pain it caused me. That one nail seemed to take forever to drive home. For me, this was almost worse than my own crucifixion.
Alicia was pleading for her life. “STOP! Please! Oh please! STOP! I cannot stand this! Please! Take it out! I’ll do anything, just….GET IT OUT!”
She wasn’t watching me any more. With horrified fascination she watched the Carnifex, as he stood up and crossed over to her other wrist. “No! Oh No… Oh no… Oh Please, no.. NOOOOOOOO!”
I felt the nails burning in my own wrists, my shoulders tearing in their sockets, my feet throbbing as my entire weight was taken by smashed and fractured bones. What could I say to her? I could hardly tell her that the worst was yet to come.
Time seems to pass more slowly. There seemed a lifetime between each strike of the hammer, as I watched my darling Alicia undergo this most appalling of tortures. I was screaming at them to stop, Alicia was, by now, just screaming in horror, protesting by violently shaking her head from side to side.
My feet had been nailed side by side, four times I had endured the invasion of my body by hard steel. For Alicia, they did it differently, for what reason I could not comprehend, but they placed her right foot over her left foot. She lifted her head and watched as they did it.
She knew what was coming, and was screaming even before the hammer struck, lighting fires in both her feet at the same time as the nail went straight through and into the wood. That fucking hammer rose and fell endlessly again, until they were satisfied that Alicia and her cross were one, and so it would remain until and beyond her death.
The sign: ‘ALICIA: REBELLATRIX IUDAORUM’ was hammered into place above her head, but that was the only respite she got before they started to raise her into position opposite my cross. Slowly it rose; they didn’t drop it, despite her panic-stricken writhings as her weight came onto the nails.
Neither did they spare her the jolt. I hadn’t realised, from my own crucifixion, quite how far it fell. One moment she seemed to be towering above me, the next, we were level with each other, and she was thrashing up and down with the sheer violence of the crash.
View attachment 556142
I gazed at her until she opened her eyes and gazed back. For a while we just looked at each other in silent misery. Then she said, “Thank you.”
“What for?”
“There is no….way…..I could…..have borne…. this…. alone.”
View attachment 556143
Below me, Marcellinus gave a short bark of laughter. For me, the bitter pain of defeat was added to the pain of the cross.
Those fucking Romans had got their own way at last. I’d done my best to stop them, but now Alicia and Scaevola were crucified.
To be continued
IMAGES: Bobinder
So, Manius decided to go after Bobinder...
Still, can't have guests die the day after we met them.
Bloody Romans! 
