But clearing the crowd is what the guards did. In her unending agony Judith hangs from her cross. In a weak, hoarse voice she cries out “Don’t leave me alone! I don’t want to die alone!”
She isn’t really alone. The guards have made a perimeter around her cross keeping the thinning crowd thirty meters from her cross. It is far enough away her cries cannot be heard so many wander down the hill before darkness arrives. Judith hangs from her cross in the center of the quiet circle. Bored, pained, and tired, Judith passes the time watching her body’s gyrations.
There is nothing else she can do. The cross limited how she could move and what she could see. Still beyond her body there were still the rocks she could not stand upon.
Judith no longer controlled her movements. Her body twisted and turned as it needed to. She could only watch her flesh’s curves and thrusts over the ground that was out of reach.
To Judith the ground below seemed to get farther away. It was still beyond her reach but seemed to get more distant as she tired from hanging from her cross.
Judith eyes snapped open and her head jerked up. She wonders is she had fallen asleep or even passed out. In front of her was a strangely dressed man sipping a cold drink from the glass he carried. Judith asks “Did the king send you?”
He shakes his head and replies he’s just a merchant in town doing trade. He asks what Judith is doing. Bluntly she says “I’m dying by my father’s orders.”
He raised an eyebrow and took a drink, then asked “What did you do?” Judith huffed and said “I had sex.”
“And that got you crucified” he replied. “You mustn’t have been too good at it.”
“I never got any complaints and you never had better” Judith proclaims.
A guard came up and told the man “Sir, you have to stay outside the perimeter.”
The man replied “The name’s ‘Tree’ and where is the perimeter?”
The guard showed him and Tree walked off, no bothering to stop once he passed the line.
Judith rolled her head back and asked no one in particular “Can’t this be over?”
The sun had slipped to the horizon when a coach came up the hill. King Richard and his wife Felicity climbed out and looked at their daughter twisting on the cross. The king says “It is going to rain tonight. I should have the guards put her out of her misery and stick a spear through her.”
Felicity snaps back “She has been condemned to die on the cross. Don’t you dare make her death any easier!”