The Cradle

The inquisitors wore heavy black robes that obscured their faces. The Grand Inquisitor lead them, his bright, hopeful face uncovered, exposed by the candelabra in his hand. The castle depths stunk of mold and moist earth. Their prisoner dragged her feet. One blackened eye slipped from her blindfold. Barely focused, she rolled it around to collect any details she saw. The candle light revealed layers of smooth blocks with wetness that reflected the noxious gleam of flame. An exhaustive noise like escaping of bad air from a hidden vent filled the corridor. One of the inquisitors took hold of her head with his gauntlet, and reapplied the blindfold to keep their captive confused- most important among the other tortures. Pain compels confession...but confusion invokes honesty.

Their Captive struggled to breath. Her exhausted body reduced her movements to short limps. Exertion hammered sharp pains into her joins. They stole her ability to stand up straight with their machines. Every muscle ached with malnourishment, and her skin festered from twilight pale to lake shore green, covered in a web of lacerations and contusions. Her dangling thumbs split by screws. A cage around her mouth kept her jaw shut. Boot steps on slick stone went on and on. She welcomed this brief pause from their interrogations, but she lost track of how long the procession to the deeper dungeons lasted. Time escaped her. The moons and suns lost to her. She hadn’t seen either one for so long that she began to wonder if they even still scoured the heavens. Her mind, it felt, seeped from her ears. Drip, drip, blood leaked in softening beads. A muffled ocean left her head as her ear drained and she heard clearly once more in her eclipsing moments of awareness the echo of the heavy boots and their sudden stop. A jingle of delicate metal, and the snapping of a latch. The agony of grinding latches and a tunnel of air rushing into a pit. The odor of stagnant water stabbed her nostrils like a trident.

“This will make her talk.” The Grand Inquisitor turned to the captive, and said into her ear. “A device of my own design.... Take her blindfold off. I want her to see it.”

One strong hand took the blindfold and tore it away with a strand of her hair.What she saw filled her with a jolt of soulless lightning. The curved rails of a rocking horse- but without the playful pony seat for a child. Confines for hands and feet on each end. In the middle of the contraption, an erect skewer pointed straight up. The mechanism sat above a pool of dark, murky fluid with unidentifiable floating meat bobbing up and down in the green foam. Small bubbles rose to the surface and popped. She thought she saw an eye attached to the meat but the firm gauntlets wrapped the blindfold back around her face. They carried her to the contraption, but the shock renewed her vigor. She kicked and swung her body weight against the hold of the inquisitors but they only held tighter as the door closed and latched behind them.

“Save your strength. This one you will not be able to use your magic on, witch. These walls have been blessed by Tomas De Torquemada, his holiness in flesh. ”

She tried to say something but the cage kept her jaw in place- she mumbled, pleading what they already heard before “I'm no witch- I'm no witch” The Grand Inquisitor understood.

“Still, she resists redemption. Then who was it that summoned the locusts to eat the crops? Who invoked the cursed air to cause every birth in your hamlet to be born inside out? Who then? Because it was you that they saw naked in the woods dancing with forest animals. It you they saw flying across the moon at night.”

The captive wanted to weep but they only provided her with enough water to keep her tongue wet. They gave her more wine than water hoping the alcohol would loosen her tongue- the drunkenness eased pain, but only for fifteen minutes before her body began to revolt with alcoholic poisoning. Sometimes they poisoned the water with bitter drops. She dumped most of what they served down the drain outside her cell.  She knew who the witch was- not the name, but she had seen her too. She already tried to explain that the witch hexed her, and used her shadow as a catalyst for her dark arts. The Grand Inquisitor grinned knowingly when she brought him this argument. He persisted his practice with full enjoyment. The Captive’s resilience impressed him. “Not many have your spirit, witch”.

The inquisitors took hold of her by the shoulders and ankles. With her face towards the ceiling, they latched her palms onto the rails with her fingers pointing to the length of her body. The binds felt rigid and rusted. The binds around her feet felt almost loose, but the inquisitors tightened them by twisting in the screws until her feet felt firmly secured. With her back arched, emaciated stomach in the air, she held herself up with dreadful anticipation- imagining the blade barely kissing the flesh of her back. In her strongest state, the position might be maintainable for a few minutes. But being isolated in a cramped, damp cell with only moldy bread to eat and drinking water dripping from the ceiling- her arms and legs trembled the very moment the inquisitors took their arms away from her. They observed as they always did, listening and losing patience, but for the Grand Inquisitor, who crossed his arms, standing before his subordinates, presenting himself as fair judgement- waiting for her to lose composure and confess at last. The Captive tried to hold still, but the cradle rocked back and forth, tipping her balance, thrown onto a scale she could not control. A cold tickle shaved a strip of flesh from the crease of her spine. She tried to breath through the mask. Upside down, the metal rested on her face. Hot breath made the grainy iron wet and slippery. Her lips felt like the cups of a tentacle. Blood rushed to her head. Back and forth- her shoulders trembled. Her ankles almost snapped into splinters by the confines. She corkscrewed he waist but it did nothing for her. The rails creaked as they swayed. A slow, lazy song. She tried to hold her back up, but she moved it no further upwards. The durability drained from her body. She felt it with every tessellation of her bones. She tried to tear her body away. The restraints kept her body well in place.  The water beneath her bubbled. Not the little bubbles that she thought she noticed- a slow boil that increased as if something rushed to the surface. A whipping splash sent cold waters across her body. She gasped thinking of the hot irons they inserted in her armpits. How cold they felt at first… something beneath her gargled, and squirmed back down with a following splash.

“Yes, there’s our pet. Sinister little thing. It will eat anything.”

The Captive felt her body sink.  The tip of the blade pierced her spine and she shot back up as warm wetness trickled down her back. With a scream she resisted the pain and tried to remain solid. This captive was no old woman- nor a helpless heiress. Her shoulders and back muscles broadened by field work- legs thick and muscular from walking several miles with buckets of water. A princess would’ve given up and let her body be impaled. The Captive remembered cold nights suffering with deadly infections, winters with only roots to eat- none was enough to kill her. She maintained her determination and rose with a jolt up. The cradle rocked, throwing her body back against the blade. It pricked her open wound, causing the mask to ring as she groaned. Her elbows cracked and her weight gave in again onto the blade. Screams rippled against the pool. Blood blossomed as it dripped.

“Maybe she’s ready.” One inquisitor said.

“No. Not yet.” The Grand Inquisitor replied.

The slobbering smack of water returned as the freezing breath of what lived below her returned. The sound it made in the water- the captive imagined but only could fear as much because her senses bounced between failure and activity- a damp slurping. With the blade in her body, she twisted her hips. Momentum swung back and forth, back and forth- but what if… she kept the blade with its point in her flesh. With her weight centered, the rocking stopped. She rose from the blade with a fatigued growl. Only 16 years old- but her voice broke and sunk back into her lungs as if cancers infected her throat.She swung from side to side, the flexing hammering bolts of pain across her midsection, and even deeper into her bones. But she understood that her interrogators didn’t care about her innocence or guilt- no one would save her, if she couldn’t save herself. The wood of the rails felt heavy. They intended to keep the device in place, but she once hauled a middle aged tree that fell up a slope to her hamlet for a christmas fire. With a strong thrust one way the rail lifted but fell back down. The skewer found a piece of the sheet she wore and tore into it. She pressed the otherway, the rails lifted, and dropped once more with the blade piercing a new hole into her body.

“Escape is impossible. Tell us, tell us now…”

With a last force, she exerted so much strength that her joints popped and snapped as the rails lifted. This time the rail didn’t fall back into place, but hung suspended, the balance compromised on the edge of a knife. either way. A terrifying thought occurred- that it would fall back and her body would be thrusted onto the skewer and when the blindfold fell from her eyes a spike would be protruding through her stomach. Her fears eased when the mechanism tipped towards the water. Now she feared drowning as the rails dropped. She gasped and confined the air to her lungs. The device cast her into the pool, upside down, but still attached. The water filled her nostrils and ears. The mask caused significant trouble, but it also formed a small bubble through which she took tiny breaths. Not enough air to fill her lungs, but with precious seconds she welcomed the relief through the weight of the mask now fell from her jaw to her throat. She heard the scrambling of the inquisitors, but something else stopped them. The blindfold feel loose, though the pit absorbed any light and left her in a blinded state nonetheless she felt it’s presence slither through the water, felt it nibble at her hair, and at her toes. The inquisitors stopped at the pool. The grand inquisitor hollered, “Stop! or this was all for nothing!”

The tentacles wrapped around the rails and constricted until the wood cracked. The metal gear on the captive pulled her down, but for a brief moment she was free in the water, sinking lower and lower. The creature swam down, and she grabbed for it- taking a chance that maybe this pit lead to a lair. She landed on the floor and moved along the bottom, hands out, feeling the ridges and a gaps for a way out. Water flowed into her mask. Her lungs burned for oxygen. Her arms lost control, and dangled in the water, as her feet lifted from the rocky bottom, and her head sunk downward. Yet she moved. She felt the sand grains scraping against her. Her organs adjusted to movement. A tentacle wrapped around her waist pulled her into a deeper, darker crevice, and took her into a darkness she never thought possible, yet cold as a frozen pond. Wounds itched, and sediments in the water bounced from her nose.

The creature pulled her to the surface. No light but for a a few glowing fungi along the jagged edges. She gasped for breath, her wounds throbbing from the contamination of the pool, her flesh shivering. She looked around, her hands attached to pieces of rail. She pulled the away and left it. The creature snarled, and with what sounded like a thousand small pegs, it beat around her in a circle, prodding her with a pair of pincers away from the bubbling hole she just entered through. In the center of the room, she found a sticky nest- adhesive pastes held her in place. In the light of the mushroom above her head, she saw a host of skeletons among her- and  nests of bulbous eggs inside of them. Her panic subsided when she realized that she was beneath the castle- no longer inside of it. Despite her hunger, and enduring the pain of tarnished extremities she drew a circle and a star with her own blood on the mask over her face. She called in the Enochian tongue- and from the dark, scaled hands with three fingers came and took hold of her constraints. The metal rusted away and broke into a cloud of powder. The wooden restraints rotted, and the latches fell with a rattle. The monster lurked nearer. A slushing gargle rolling from its hungry jaws. She backed away, loose, but mere feet away from the flat, mashing rows of subterranean teeth. Her hands stumbled around rocks and puddles. She smashed a glowing mushroom, leaving pieces of illuminating tissue smeared on her palm, and along the tatters of her sheet. The creature snapped, and took a piece of fabric and tore it away,  snarling with confusion, as it leapt to a wall and began racing around the perimeter. The captive rose to her feet. She felt a stream of cold air, and she meandered after it with the monster following. Its heavy, amphibious pods pedaled towards her. She only saw the bits of it that the glowing revealed- scales and fins, gills, and a long tail with a spearhead shaped tuff at the end. A water creature, not equipped for being on land. She felt safer, the sensation crumbled to dust  as a sizzling string of drool splattered from the ceiling onto the bald spot on her scalp. A talon took hold of her arm, and but she took a rock and smashed into the talon. A face emerged, and she struck the creature into the mouth- breaking a row of teeth out as the monster tumbled to the ground she turned around and hurried like a blind person in a burning building. The stream smelled fresh as summer rain. She padded further, a pale gleam shone down a faint stream trickling down misting rocks. Sunlight.

In the light, the monster stopped, sitting still, its forked tongue hanging, its chest heaving, desperation pulsing in its eyes. The captive climbed up the rocky path towards the opening. The monster panted, heavy and slow, desiring and starving, but unable to pursue as it released an anguished groan when it tried to transit. Her limbs barely took hold. She stopped, and invoked a source of energy, anything to get her just a few feet forward. Her entire body ached and trembled in pain. She caught her reflection in the stream, and she didn’t see a face she knew as her own- but the scarred, grime coated face of a hag. She didn’t know how much to attribute to the techniques employed by her hosts, or to the passage of time. Her youth, she could recapture. She did it before many times. In the fresh cold water, she slurped and slurped until her stomach hurt. She soaked her hands, and scrubbed her face, digging her nails into the wrinkles and digging out the encrusted filth. She peeled away strips of flesh like dried glue. She looked again, and in the reflective surface she saw the young woman once more. She exited the cave with an agonized grunt into the grassy swamp between the coast and the ramparts of the castle. The inquisitors would be searching, she knew. But she had so much more work to do. As she marched through the mud of the swamp, she felt the spark revive in her blood. The tingle of lightning, the kiss of night rain, the whisper of the dark grew stronger with every beat of her heart. She heard horses neigh from the castle. The shadow from the sentinel towers crossed the swamp. She slipped into the much, and crawled into the shadow to conceal herself better. Exhausted. Hungry. Injured.  The sunrise clouds brightening through a red veil of bending light. The wounds in her back wreaked by the cradle hurt the most. Almost with a crippling agony did the pain develop, as if a poison had been smeared onto the blade remained and burrowed into her marrow. Her spine ached as she stressed her lower back. She felt something adjust and pop. Scars from weights and clamps branded her mashed elbows, knees, ankles. To avoid the agony, she tossed her upper body back as she stepped forward. The pain minimised, but still present. She took a branch from a fallen tree and used it as a cane, stabbing it into the mud and leaning on it as she pulled one leg after the other.

The swamp thickened, but over the mud and patches of weed she saw the forest. Horses cried. The gates of the castle clanked in the distance. She looked back at her progress. A trail about a mile long ran from where she emerged.

The deep swamp felt different. Still,  windless, not even a chirp of a cricket or screech of a vulture. Only the slushing mud. That’s where she spotted the outer rampart, hollow, half of the stone facade gone and sunken, iron pikes prodded outwards towards the trees. As she entered the shadow of the rampart, leaned against a fallen block, fighting aches, breathing slow though air felt like pins in the vulnerable crags of her throat. She looked out over the deep end of swamp and saw the countless bones, and tattered flags of an army long since swallowed by the mud of the swamp. She didn’t rest long. Horsemen galloped from the castle.

The Captive struggled to hurry. Her injuries nearly crippling, she dropped down, and dug her malformed fingers into the mud, and dug out bone after bone. Some bodies had sunk in neat piles, others fell in in pieces, all of which she dumped back into the mud with desperate growls. With each approaching sound of the horses, the agonies of their techniques recurred and materialized at a physical level. The condition of her fingers, barely able to open and close them, hardly affected her excavation. Some places of the swamp, she found the mud to be like a thick cake, but as she moved towards the forest it became more runny and watery. Dark brown, to a fine green- yellow like the skin of a rotting squash.

Once she found the remains of the horse, she hurried to compose. “No one ‘dabbles’ in necromancy.” someone told her once. “because the simplest spell requires the offering of blood to spill”.

She dabbed her finger into her ear, reddened with blood she drew the circle on the skull of the horse. Holding it tight, and proclaimed an invocation- every vein in her neck throbbed as she sung the words. She howled like an animal, digging her hands into the bone- her finger printers filled with bone and mud, until she could feel the body of the horse through her hands. She repeated the words. Again and again.

Whips lashed at the horses.

Worms surfaced, hundreds of them squirming up like flower stems towards the sunlight. Bones wearing rusted armor arose, chunks of mud dripping from their hips and ribs. The horse skeleton remained in the mud. The captive focused, repeating the words. Skulls dropped from the shoulders of the dead soldiers, and the bones sunk back into the mud. The captive considered the complications of such efforts, the risks, the sweet entertainments, and broke her concentration because the ripping of hooves interrupted the squirming of the worms.  She bit open both palms with what teeth remained in her head, and used the blood to cover the exposed bones of the horse. She coated the skull, the spines, the ribs, widening her wounds until her head almost floated away. With the skeleton painted, she tried once more with the incantation, sitting on the horse's back, she felt it rise against her body as if lifted from the mud. She let a triumphant squawk escape as the horse trotted away from the castle towards the forest in an unlaboured manner impossible for a living horse. Without fatigue, or consideration for what lies in front of it. It moved at a faster pace than the captive. Her hair fluttered in the speed the horse carried her on. Weight off her body at last, her feet almost dropped off they felt so relieved. She held tight, hooking her fingers into the empty eye sockets, saddling her legs around its ribs. The momentum slid her from the back of the horse, but she hung on, and climbed back on top. The bare spine irritated the wounds created by what her captors called the “spanish horse”. Such pain meant nothing to her in the excitement of her escape. She smelled the trees.

The dead horse cut through brush and overgrowth like fire. It took her into the woods until the cover of leaves blocked the sun. The horse moved forward, until she whispered a secret into its ear socket. The skeletal horse then took a new direction, away from the Captive’s home, and towards the most ancient part of the forest. The trees grew thicker, and taller. Little men, long since cursed, trapped in the shells of tree bark marked her path until the forest air began to sour.  Here she climbed away. The horse collapsed into a pyramid of ash as she made her way to the hutch underneath the roots of a great tree. She smelled the burning herbs, the boiling water, the rapping of winged creatures against the wires of their cages. A hanged rabbit swung by its feet, its ears harvested. Smoke rolled from the opening of the hutch. Feet shuffled within. The Captive held out her bloody, crippled hands as if they held candles in the dark. She took enticing steps, cracking branches and leaves with her bare feet. The Witch heard nothing. She rummaged around the hutch, a shrill of a woman she used to be, her mind completely occupied with the majesties of her darkest ambitions. When the Captive entered, the witch dropped the rabbit ears into the fire. The smoke concealed the Captive, but her form emerged from the smoke as she came inside. The witch continued her work. The Captive sealed her attention onto the hag. She took the cauldron by the rings on the side and tipped it over. The foam rose over the rim, and a steaming curtain filled the hutch as the the liquid unleashed a wave of skin melting fluid across the dirt floor. The witch screamed and lost control of her body, falling to the ground, her magic unable to save her as what remained of the Captive stood above her.

“You’ll lead them here. They’ll find me now.” The Witch said to the Captive, her

raw throat choking on dry air.

“You betrayed me.” The Captive looked down at the sweltering hag as the skin bubbled and dripped from muscle. The hag took a few final breathes and lay still as the steaming puddle soaked into the dirt.

The Captive faced for home, but she knew that she could never return. Her escape confirmed to the inquisitors their suspicions, and in her small village there could be no hiding. She pondered, while looking over the lifeless witch, whether or not the Grand Inquisitor hoped for her to escape because to do so required her use of archaic secrets. She anticipated the shame from too many sinister glances, too many unwelcomed noses poking in. Freedom at last, her valued reward, before the predator’s night. The wolves and rats stalk, and the enchantments of the forest animates what has died for the time the moon shines on the remains. A dangerous place, somewhere no one treads. The Captive left the hutch, taking with her what she coveted from the witch, and what she needed to mend her wounds. She looked in every direction, smelling encroaching smoke all around her.