The Spanish Horse
by Graham Swanson
After the war ended, a wild judge from the rubble of what was once the Magnificent City declared the
death penalty Null and Void and replaced it with the sentence of public torture. His royal interrogators
built a great sawhorse in the middle of the ruins so that the survivors living in the destruction witnessed
the operation. It appeared overnight like morning glory, the sharpened wedge gleamed like the sun on a
smooth beach, fifteen sharp feet in the air, a puddle of blood already left black stains on the grass
growing underneath its mighty legs. The judge hired the Grand Inquisitor of Amaymon to oversee the
process.
He entered court wearing a red tie and black cape. Oiled feathers covered his face and arms.
Under the Broken Cross of the Great Crusade, the Inquisitor took on the heavy suede of the red robes under a black hat. Every day he patrolled the prison and looked into each cell with his men. They stopped at the end of the hall, torches in hand, to pull a thin pale man from a flooded hole in the ground. He punched and kicked, bit and spat up mouthfuls of dirty water on their boots. The Inquisitor felt no remorse and smiled at the doomed man. The pit didn’t break his spirit. The “Math” class didn’t either. Nor did the back-breaking labor packing bullet into magazines.
“I’m innocent. You’re killing an innocent man! A reasonable man! A human being!”
“You were one of those conspirators who rioted against our great Fortress and spread subversion to our people, yes?”
“Where is your compassion? Where is your heart?”
The Inquisitor's men twisted his arms and beat him until he collapsed into their arms.
“Now I tried to help you and get you moved to the deadly disease testing ward, but the judge said he needs it to be dramatic. Perhaps If you went before a painting of His Honor, and confessed to trying to demoralize the good folk of our new order, tell the public you will plead for mercy even though you are trash, maybe we can get you stacking plague bodies in the catacombs under the city.”
The Prisoner found no words in the bubbles of blood swelling in his mouth. Once a fearless orator known across broadcast towers, he’d been in prison so long without an audience or person to talk to that he forgot how to use words. Without seeing the sun in years, his eyes sunk into the back of his head. He forgo what the wind sounded like, and how the ground warmed up in the morning. Like a sailor prepared to die at sea, he spat on the floor and told them again, and mumbled under his breath.
“Now, we want peace, and we want to restore all that was damaged. Look at it this way, you are on the brink of a new era. A lot is riding on your shoulders. More than there has ever been in your entire life. You’ll be up there for many days now, so meditate on this woe as you approach your death with dignity. The whole world will follow our testament soon, and you were the first to hear it.”
The Inquisitor’s men dragged the inmate by his feet across the loose stones of the under-dwelling to the platform that rose from the mushrooms and stagnant puddles to the bright pale overworld above. The light blinded the condemned. Once the glare wore away he opened his unswollen eye, he saw clearly the Spanish Horse erected above him with robes and stones ready. Deer lept from a broken wall to untamed bushes. Seabirds built nests in the sills of fractured silohs, and children played naked amid the cannons of wrecked tanks and emptied assault rifles.
The Inquisitor led the procesion. They escorted him to a platform of stairs, each one creaked and bent under his shrunken feet. His thin, atrophied legs trembled. Each creek made a horrible sound that burrowed into his spinal discs like a bad memory. In every blown-over building, he saw candles and cold, furious faces. Sunlight warmed his face. His guts turned to lead. His blood turned to mud. His heartbeat hardened as his feet moved faster. He kept singing lullabies to the rye fields blowing between sections of destroyed city, and to himself, a single spell as the Inquisitor's men ran a sharpener on the wedge of the Spanish Horse. A woman under a fowl mask blessed the blade with sacred well and asked him for last words.
“I'm not the only one bleeding here. The past is never done repeating. You know what I say is true.”
“Talmage the Deceiver, may you be purified and returned to the sacred well.”
The Inquisitor, the Priestess, and the armed men all prayed out loud together. "Thank you for the strength to crush our enemies. Thank you for sending these heavenly devices down to us."
The woman under the fowl mask uttered holding the hand of the prisoner. She gave the signal for the men to begin the torture. They tied a bag around his head and placed him on a slide to lower him onto the wedge. Once saddled, they held his legs down and strapped the cuffs to his ankles, and then dropped the stones. Each one weighed fifty pounds, and when they stopped midair, an unmistakable report of pain sent all the animals and children fleeing back into their hiding places.
The guards sat with their machine guns on top of the walls. If a foot broke off and he rolled over, their orders to shoot on sight earned them accolades among the Inquisitor’s office.
The first day he screamed and screamed and screamed until the sun rose again.
Then he sat there moaning, moaning, moaning.
By the third day, he sat still, and quiet. The children came back out to curiously loom over rooftops to see the shade of the Spanish Horse expand in the clouded sunlight.
On the fourth day, hawks arrived and packed at the mask over his face, and pulled tendons from his shoulders.
By the fifth day, a cloud of flies covered the man and chewed through the holes in his face bag.
By the sixth day, the wedge cut through half his body. The blade stopped at his ribs.
The children dared each other. Go over. Go there. The young girl with red hair kept telling them "no no", but they called her a coward and a witch, until she accepted the gang’s dare, and from the rooftop, she planned her route around the guards.
The girl crawled under fallen roads, jumped over pits full of lice and rotten clothing, climbed up the scaffolding of a windmill leaning from a building to jump over the heads of the armed guards quietly, then she crawled into the gutter pipe and rode it down to the bushes below. The guards heard the snapping of branches and flutter of alarmed cats. They carried their assault rifles around torn chain links and melted beams. The small girl huddled her body as small as she could make it, and crammed herself into a water hole where a brick used to be. They found nothing and went back to monitoring the condemned.
The girl broke free, scratching her knees and elbows, and creating a deep gash above her eye. The blood got in her hair and eyes, but she experienced far worse bruises playing in the foggy towers by the collapsed bridge. She rubbed dirt and sediment into the wound until the bleeding stopped. It burned like a cooking sheet, but she knew that once she found watershed clean it out and wear a proper headwrap and ice. She looked around wondering why the guards failed to notice her, and she realized that her fingers, neck, toes all covered in sheets, soot, and blood like everything else in the playground of ruins.
The man on the Spanish Horse loomed before her, hanging there like a black ribbon caught in the barbed wire. His head down, hands tied behind his back, ankles exposed and drenched in blood. Dogs carried off the slabs of meat from under the Spanish Horse. Flies the size of darts flew out of tears in his hood. Blood trickled to the ground below. Black birds swarmed overhead. Tender blue flowers grew on top of fallen roofs around him. The girl listened to the wind, to the flies, to the smoldering of the guards smoking, to the wheezing of their lungs, and she crawled over glass and broken wheels until she stood under the shadow of the Spanish Horse.
