She could feel the villagers even though she couldn’t see them. There were no sounds other than the clink and rattle of the soldiers’ buckles and straps, none of the usual background noise of the village. No shouting or laughing or barking dogs or clucking chickens. Just the roaring of blood in her own ears. Myriam knew that they were taking her to the platform in the middle of the square, just a straight line from the door of the sachristy where she’d been held but she felt dizzy and disoriented, almost as if she couldn’t even tell which direction was up. She could feel the mud and stones beneath her feet and between her toes and knew it should feel cold but it wasn’t, just wet.
They didn’t bother to tell her when they arrived at the platform. There was a hesitation in their forward motion and she kicked the bottom step with her toe. Again, she knew it should hurt but all she felt was the pressure. This was reassuring. Maybe none of it will hurt, she thought. Reaching out blindly with her feet she found the flat of the step and moved forward and now that were hands reaching for her, grabbing and pulling and lifting. They were holding her arms and shoulders and hip, the palm of one sliding around behind her to cup one buttock as they turned her, strong fingers wrapped in her hair to guide her, pushing her off balance. For an instant she was weightless and almost cried out and then the bench came up hard beneath her and she was sitting. The other hands were gone now, only the one in her hair and when he began speaking she realized it was the captain.
“You people!” he cried out. “You have harbored a traitor and a whore in your midst!” He was trying to project his thin voice but it just came out loud and brassy. He took a deep breath. “This bastard bitch, whose mother was the village whore, you should have seen what she would become! She fucked traitors and fed traitors and sheltered traitors and now you will watch her die like a traitor!”The fingers in her hair pulled up so that she was sitting erect and there was a ripping noise that she couldn’t immediately place. She heard the villagers gasp now and right away angry muttering, an old woman somewhere saying “Dios” and she was confused again until she felt the cool air sweeping over her, skin goosebumping and nipples rising to meet the evening mist and she realized they had torn off her blouse to display her to the crowd.
“Look at her!” the captain said. “Gaze upon her! She is not deserving of humility or respect for she has no shame! A brazen whore and traitor!”
Then he released her and she heard his boots scrape on the stairs and he was gone.
She still wasn’t cold but her breasts felt impossibly full and Myriam thought that here at the end her mind must be deserting her because, as she sat waiting for the crash of rifles, it occurred to her that if the captain were to return and touch her she would shudder with release right there on the platform before the entire village.
She took a deep breath.
Myriam woke up back in the sachristy and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a thick candle bleeding wax. For a long time she stared at it, afraid to move or even take inventory of herself. There was no feeling, not evening numbness, just floating even though she knew was laying on the same bench where she had spent the last four nights. Nights. Was it day or night? The room was dark. She knew that a glance at the door would tell her whether daylight was seeping in from the bottom or not but she didn’t want to leave the candle. She couldn’t remember anything after taking that last breath. Had there been rifles? An intervention, divine or otherwise? Obviously she was back where she had started but did she walk or was she carried?
The candle flame didn’t flicker. It burned steady and straight, unmoving.
Her senses began to return to her. The smell of the small room – sweat, shit, damp – boiled up around her and she smiled as if at an old friend. She could see beyond the candle now, at the same old table upon which it sat, the bare plaster wall behind, the blank spots on the walls where things had been hung. Now she was aware of the straw and hard wood beneath her, scratchy against her skin, and the itch of dried sweat and her unshaven legs. I’m here, she said and the sound of her own whispered voice startled her.
Slowly, as if she were made of glass and might shatter, she raised herself up, first on her arms and then sitting.
The world beyond the locked door was dark. It was night.
They had returned her to her cell but taken her clothes and she was completely nude. Even the blanket had been removed. Myriam touched herself gingerly and was relieved to discover she had not been raped. She felt no bruises or cuts or welts so apparently they had not beaten her, either.
What had happened? A last minute reprieve, the prisoner dragged from the platform, stripped and locked away again. But who? Not the captain, surely, but he was the supreme power in the village and he was adamant about having her executed. No one else had the authority to override his decision, at least not without using force. Had Grimaldi returned and rescued her? But if that had had happened, why was she still a prisoner?
There was no way to know now. The truth would reveal itself eventually.
She lay back down, curled into herself against the chill, and soon was asleep.
A wagon pulled by a team of horses arrived in the village three days after the battle at the end of a long column of soldiers in blue-gray uniforms. An officer on horseback had arrived first with his sword drawn, riding to the middle of the square where he was greeted by a sergeant and four privates, the only survivors of the force that had attacked and taken the town. The rest of his men filled in the square and then fanned out, searching and taking defensive positions. There were irregular dark mounds lined up in the mud and even though he was expecting to see them, it took the colenel a moment to recognize that they were made up of corpses. He looked at them just long enough to determine which were the enemy, which were his men and which were villagers and made no mention of the fact that the third pile was the largest. Then he glanced around at the buildings fronting the square, noting with much more interest the pitted and gouged walls, broken out windows, the collapsed roof of the flame-scorched hulk of what appeared to have been the home of the town’s most prosperous citizen.
He received the sergeant’s report, less interested in the actual details than the numbers and was gratified to hear that the enemy’s losses were significantly higher than those of his own army but mildly annoyed that an estimated dozen of the enemy had slipped away. The surviving attackers had begun to filter in from their positions, now occupied by the colenal’s men, throughout the town. They were dirty, soot- and blood-stained, with hollow eyes and sagging shoulders. Some of them supported wounded comrades wearing crude bandages or using broken rifle stocks as crutches. As they assembled he nodded to his own orderly to bring wagon up.
“You fought well,” he told the sergeant. “Where is Lieutenant Mendoza’s body?”
“We buried the dead, sir, behind the church.” He hesitated. “They were beginning to stink.”
The colenal nodded matter-of-fact. “Disinter Mendoza, we’re returning him to the coast. Leave the others.” He turned as the wagon creaked to a stop. “Your wounded who cannot walk, ride. The rest walk. Send out an advance patrol along the road, we’re leaving immediately.” He was still holding his sword as if he intended to use it and as the sergeant barked out orders and wounded men climbed painfully or were lifted onto the wagon and a three-man patrol began trotting wearily back down the road along which the reinforcements had come he finally sheathed it.
“Now show me the girl,” he said.
The church had been battered but the sachristy, a low stone building built against one wall but not actual attached to it, seemed to have escaped. It was the most secure structure on the square, with a heavy iron-hinged oak door and no windows. Two men stood guard and a heavy padlock had to be negotiated – with difficulty as the colenal noted for the first time the sergeant was missing two fingers from one hand and although the wound was obviously fresh he wore no dressing – before entrance could be gained. Watery sunlight filtered into a dark, stuffy room that at one time had stored vestments, bibles and other supplies but now was empty except for a low straw-covered bench and precarious table. The air was hot and thick and smelled of piss and shit from the privy bucket that he could see in a far corner.
“It stinks in here,” he said and stopped just inside the doorway.
The sergeant waited outside and said nothing.
She had been laying on the bench and now raised herself up on one elbow, blinking sleepily. The colenal had been a prisoner. There isn’t much else to do but sleep.
“Stand up,” he told her.
The girl was filthy. According to the sergeant, she had been held by the army for nearly a week before the battle, locked in the sachristy continuously except for one brief trip out into the square where the officer in charge had lined her up in front of a firing squad as the whole village watched.
“Why didn’t they shoot her?” he asked.
“At the very moment there was a report the rebels were attacking so they put her away to face the attack. The officer intended to bring her out the next day and finish it but that was the day of our own attack.”
The colenal turned and looked at him. “How do you know this?”
“Prisoners, sir.”
“Prisoners? I didn’t see any prisoners.”
“We shot them, sir.”
He turned back. The girl watched them impassively, her body relaxed and seemingly unconcerned but her eyes alert and never leaving his, not even when he ran his own gaze up and down her length. His army had been in the field for more than three months, fighting their way inland from the coast and the only women he could remember seeing were either toothless old cronies or corpses. This was one was decidedly neither.
“Who is she?”
“They said the daughter of the local whore.”
At this her gaze flickered, but only for a moment.
“Where is the mother now?”
He could hear the sergeant’s shrug.
“Where is your mother?
It took her several long moments before she tried to answer and even then she had to work her jaw and lips to produce enough saliva to speak and when she did her voice creaked with rust.
“Dead, sir.”
“Father?”
“Dead, sir.”
“Why are you here?”
“She was fucking the rebel commander, sir.” the sergeant broke in.
At this the colonel laughed and turned back to the sergeant. “They had an actual commander? Who kne? What happened to him?” “Dead, Major. They said they trapped him in a ravine just north of here and shot him. The day before we arrived.”
The girl flinched, just barely.
“Well,” the colonel said. He sized her up again. Long legs, round hips, full high tits. Her hair was matted and caked with dirt and sweat but it was thick and fell almost to the small of her back. It didn’t take much imagination to see what was there. It didn’t take any, actually. Even in that state she would be a dangerous distraction to a fighting army on the move.
“Clean her up. Get something to cover her. Put her in the wagon with the wounded. Cover that hair. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”
