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Leather cracked over naked white flesh. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as a slow burn built beneath his skin. Blood crawled down his back like insects. He tossed back his black hair, moaning softly in an entreaty to God to expunge the evil from his soul. Over the left shoulder, over the right, thongs chanted their own iron-tipped atonement to Him on the drum of his body. Kyrie Eleison, Kyrie Eleison, libera me Domine… Father Radcliff gazed up at the crucifix on an otherwise bare wall; his Savior, bloodied as he was, dying in agony for a wretch like him. The austerity of his room could not cleanse his mind of impure thoughts. He picked up the cat o’nine tails again, and the rawhide tongues once more licked a back already aflame with agonizing offerings to a Lord he despised.
The priest stood before her. She watched him with large dark eyes, eyes innocent of the transgressions for which they had convicted her. Thus she refused to confess, no matter the tortures put to her. “Witch!” the crowd shouted. What passed in silence between the priest and the girl was their eternal secret, theirs and God’s alone. “Confiteor Deo Omnipotenti,” he intoned, “quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere.” Her lips remained sealed, but the confession of sin was as much for his contrition as for hers. “Confess,” he hissed, “and save your soul!” “Tibi, Pater,” she whispered. “Only to you.” She lifted her gaze heavenward, hands clasped now in true supplication. “Gere curam mei finis. Dona nobis pacem. Sit sempiterna gloria.” For a few moments he could only stare at her, his heart twisting in the throes of hypocrisy. Flames might burn away her flesh, but her spirit would not suffer the agony of eternal damnation, not like his. With trembling hands he held out the elaborate silver cross he’d been clutching to his chest. She kissed the ruby in its center. He closed his eyes, counting his breaths, one, two, three… “If the girl will not confess to the accusations set forth against her,” cried the archdeacon, “then she cares not for the state of her soul! She has chosen damnation rather than the grace of God! Let her burn!” “Burn the witch!” the crowd responded, as if it were a participatory sermon and not a human life hanging in the balance. “She has made her choice, Father,” the archdeacon said, laying his sausage-fingered hand on his shoulder. “We must give her over to God’s punishment now.” The young priest gazed at her one last time, pleading silently with her to confess. Yet betrayal of any kind, whether of herself or of him, was a concept completely foreign to her. Rebecca peered back at him, and the corners of her mouth turned up into a small, sweet smile. My savior, dying for my sin. “Come, Father.” The priests stepped down from the dais. A hooded executioner, blazing torch in hand, lit the pyre below her. Sweat trickled down Rebecca’s face. She thrashed against the post, flames lapping at her unprotected feet. Acrid black smoke swirled up and outward, and the nearest spectators began to cough. “Deo!” she screamed when the fire began to devour her legs. “Sit sempiterna gloria!” Smoke stung Father Radcliff’s eyes, a believable excuse for the tears he shed. Perspiration from his brow and upper lip rolled down his neck. Through the shimmer of heat rising from the pyre he saw her head roll back, face glistening, her gown and her body blackened. Her skin bubbled and peeled like flakes of paint. His knees buckled, and he pitched to the ground in a tacit appeal for forgiveness. She was falling all over him like snow, and no matter how he tried to brush her away she remained, ever more of her. What had she done that he could feel the flames raging through his body? When
the wind shifted, the last remnants of an earthbound seraph swirled
upward toward the Heaven that called her home. He wondered if
she journeyed there alone. # Last night marked her third day in the cold cell, a frigid subterranean room beneath the courthouse. Rebecca lay naked on a dirt floor with no fire to warm her. It was almost ironic, given the death she was to face in the morning. And she would die whether she confessed or not, innocent or guilty. Most of the priests, being amongst the few educated men, recognized that condemnation was a double-edged sword. It was only a question of dying as the liar the tribunals needed in order to appease peasant hysteria. Snow blanketed the village outside. Father Radcliff visited her twice a day in the hope of coaxing a confession from her, if only to end the torture. Her hair had begun to grow back during the weeks of her incarceration. She curled up in a corner with nothing to hide the shame of her nudity, so out of respect he set his lantern on the far end of the chamber where its light could not touch her. “I won’t speak,” she said softly. “If they mean to kill me, so be it. You know what will happen if I do. They will find out! Do you want that?” “I can leave. I can start over in a new town--” She shook her head, ever the wiser of them. “Word will catch up with you soon enough. My doom has already been written. Why destroy both of us?” “But it’s because of me that you…” He knelt down. “I betrayed you to protect myself,” he murmured. “Mea culpa.” He breathed a white puff of air onto his chilled hands to warm them. The few of her fingers not mangled by thumbscrews reach through the bars, and he linked his own with them. “I am not free of guilt, if guilt is what God commands us to feel,” she said softly. “I will do penance for all of us.” “I am a coward. God will not have me, and yet I pretend to be His servant.” He squeezed her frozen hand in the hope of transmitting some of his warmth to her. Instead, he felt a tingle of heat generated by her slender fingers pass into his body. She was some sort of magical creature after all, he thought, but no witch.
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