Purgation

Back on Earth, even living in a country of Buddhists and animists as he did, Yuya had been a beneficiary of a Catholic education. His high school had been run by a lay religious order known as the Marist Brothers. They had given him good polytechnic instruction, when he had been willing to apply himself. But outside the curriculum, the things you learned from a teacher's anecdotes could be a little different from what might come up in a secular institution.

For example, his first-year biology teacher, a young Sicilian man who seemed motivated to be there mostly by japanophilia and only a little by missionary zeal, had once gone on a long tangent about the science behind crucifixion. The cross, from which the process drew its name, had either the shape conventionally associated with Christian imagery, an uppercase T shape, or sometimes an X-shape, all to the end of hyperextending the victim’s arms, which were either tied or nailed through through the wrist– if the Shroud of Turin was either an authentic relic or a realistic artist’s representation, straight through the ulnar nerve. Mounted vertically, usually with the feet attached similarly, the victim's body was turned into the instrument of its own torture, its weight stretching the muscles of his arms and chest until they burned under the strain. This tension would constrain the lungs, making the mere act of inhaling difficult unless the victim pulled himself up by the arms. This constant involuntary exertion, coupled with a limited flow of oxygen into the body, drove anaerobic cellular activity and put out immense quantities of lactic acid, the substance responsible for muscle pain during and after prolonged exercise. It was unclear whether this difficulty breathing was enough to cause asphyxia in a victim who simply gave up; most likely, the luckiest ones, or the ones who were tortured most thoroughly beforehand, would succumb to some sort of cardiovascular failure within a few hours, while the rest suffered a days-long ordeal eventually ended by acidosis, dehydration, or the jaws of a passing predator, who seldom started with the victim's most important parts.

The tax collector's men had, as some small fortune, brought rope and not nails, and they had only given Yuya five or six lashes with a rod as he had dragged the T-shaped piece of wood chosen to display his corpse up the tallest hill between Ak-Toum and Lish-Zadir. Now he sat bound hand and foot, while one of the guards dug with a narrow shovel. He appeared only to remove sand and gravel from an old slot carved out from the dense clay that lay beneath the ground here. It seemed Yuya was not the first condemned to die on this hill, and he doubted he would be the last.

The second guard looked him up and down as the other worked. “You want any of his clothes?”

“Some beggar’s smelly rags? I think not.”

“He does not dress poorly, for a beggar.” The guard examined his sandals, which were certainly not the cheapest pair the town cobbler had. Yuya had paid a not-insubstantial portion of the money earned entertaining with his phone for them. The dead phone itself, they had already taken, along with his money, and the pile of spare clothes and bedding he had hoarded in the alley off the market square. Other than that, he wore the t-shirt he had arrived on Nod in, and white pants of a sort sometimes worn for workwear in Ak-Toum, held up by a string about the waist and coming down to mid-calf. The guard fingered the shirt’s shoulder, and there was a callous dismissiveness in the motion that made Yuya feel violated, in a way opposite what charged, lascivious handling might have provoked. “The shirt is strange. Fine fabric, and richly dyed, but these seams cannot be very strong. Quite even, though. And the collar stretches and shrinks like a band of sinew.”

“Stick it on your head, use it as a keffiyeh, maybe. Not sure I would ever take it as a shirt over either full sleeves or a bare chest.”

Yuya was stunned silent, out of indignance as much as fear. They were about to kill him, and they were discussing how to use the clothes he was still wearing as though they were old rags found in an untended closet.

The guard with the shovel peered down his hole. “Ought to do it. Untie his arms, let's get him on.”

They loosed his bond, and as each seized him by one wrist and started to drag, a spell of unreality broke. A voice in the back of Yuya's head changed its mantra from this can't be happening to get away. He pulled himself upright in their hands, braced his tied feet against a rock, and jerked back against their grips.

Not a finger came loose. A boot hit the back of his knee. “Oh, a worm, huh?” a guard jeered.

“Trying to wriggle away.”

“Where would you crawl, little worm?”

They laid him down on his cross, pulling his shirt off over his head before they tied him down.

“And what is this?” A hard finger poked at his shoulder.

“Funny tattoo. Is that the old writing? What does master Uzdel call it, the ‘Antediluvian Script'? Oddly cultured for a gang tattoo.”

“Might be worth mentioning. If only to get him a posthumous charge of low sorcery or impersonating a djinn-invoker. I wouldn't worry about it, for now.”

“It is rarely good luck to kill a sorcerer.” But they continued their task all the same.

They stripped off his sandals and ankle bond, and gave his pants a tug.

When they saw what lay beneath, they laughed. “Leave him his pants. He's only a thief, let him die with at least a shred of dignity.”

Maybe it was because he was already at the end of his rope, but it was this ridicule, more than any callousness or physical cruelty, that took the fight out of Yuya. He laid still as they bound his feet, and bowed his head as they hoisted him upright. After filling in around the cross until it was more-or-less straight upright, the guards stopped to admire their handiwork, then cast a look at the late afternoon sun. “Wonder if the jumping scorpions will find him before sunrise.”