When Feteror regained consciousness, he was greeted by the stare of a line of lifeless eyes. The heads of all the children he had had killed were arranged around him in a circle. He slowly took an inventory of his body. He could feel pain in his chest, from both the ropes wrapped around it and several broken ribs. He could sense something hard and straight against his back and realized he was tied upright to a thick pole. He was naked, the cool night air brushing against his skin.
Carefully he tested, but the stake was set deep into the earth and solid. The ropes were thick and well tied.
It was dark outside the circle of heads, the only light coming from a lantern set on the ground three feet in front of him. But Feteror could sense the people lurking there, watching, the hate washing over him in waves. Feteror smiled.
A whip snapped out of the dark, the leather knots on the edge slashing into his skin, peeling back a long slice on his chest.
Feteror’s only response was a sharp intake of breath, the smile still on his face. The whip came again. And again. The smile disappeared only when he slid into unconsciousness, the skin flayed from waist to neck.
When he came to, it felt as if his upper body were on fire. Just taking a breath caused his wounds to reopen and agony to surge into his brain. He looked about. Night still blanketed the countryside and the heads were still watching him. He leaned his head back and looked up to the stars. He remembered seeing those same stars as a child while riding on the open steppes. His grandfather telling him the stories of the animals the various stars represented. He also remembered seeing that same sky often while in the field during training. He had traveled by those stars many times on operations all over the world, but he knew tonight he would be taking his last journey.
Movement drew his attention back to earth. A woman came out of the shadows. She was small, wrapped in robes, only her dark eyes showing through a slit in her turban. In her hand she held a short curved knife, the firelight glinting off the highly polished surface. She was one of the women who accompanied the men when they went to war.
Feteror knew what to expect. The woman reached and grabbed him between the legs, pulling none too gently. The knife flashed. Surprisingly, Feteror felt little. Despite the pain he was able to think quite clearly with a part of his mind. He figured that any pain from below his waist would have trouble overriding the tide of agony from his flayed skin. The woman held up his severed penis in her hand and, with a shrill scream, carried it back into the darkness to throw it to the dogs. Another woman came out with a dirty rag and a piece of rope. She pressed the rag up against the new wound, tying it in place with the rope. Feteror knew they weren’t concerned with infection but they didn’t want him to bleed to death. Not yet.
A man appeared, large, as tall as Feteror’s six and a half feet. He carried something long in his hand. Feteror forced himself to focus. It was a sledgehammer. He could even see the Cyrillic writing on the side as the man came closer. It must have been taken off of a Russian tank that the mujahideen had destroyed. Forged in a factory back in the motherland. Feteror found that strangely amusing. That he and this sledgehammer, both forged far to the north and west, would end up here at the same place at the same time in this godforsaken land.
The man gestured and the same woman who had tied the crude bandage in place came up, carrying another piece of cloth. She folded it over several times, then knelt, pressing it up against the front of Feteror’s right knee.
Feteror’s thoughts on fate and his newly developed theory on pain below the waist were both gone in an instant as the man swung the sledgehammer into Feteror’s right kneecap, smashing it against the thick stake he was tied to, the sound of the bone underneath the cloth being crushed as devastating as the pain.
Feteror screamed for the first time.
The sledgehammer went back once more. And again. And again.
Feteror, the essence of him, retreated from the pain, climbing into the recesses of his mind, praying for death or at least unconsciousness, but each time the latter came, the mujahideen would bring him alert with pain to a previously undamaged part of his body. And they kept death at bay by searing shut any bleeding wound with a hot knife, although the use of the cloth kept the hammer from opening too many wounds. Feteror’s only hope lay in the possibility that they would run out of things to do to him or that they would grow bored and kill him.
But as dawn touched the eastern sky, neither appeared to be close.
He could now see past the circle of severed heads. He was at the edge of the village. A crowd of mujahideen watched him silently, the hate in their eyes not abated in the least. Feteror was now in some other place, someplace removed even from his own mind, floating above, able to look down on his own body tied to the stake. He wondered if he was dead, but the body— his body— still twitched with life.
The old man, the village elder, was tied to a stake on the other side of the circle of heads. A leather band was stretched around his forehead, forcing him to look directly ahead. His eyelids had been sliced off. A man stood next to the elder, speaking in a low voice that Feteror could not make out. The elder was also naked. Several leather bands were wrapped around his body and limbs.
A woman came up, several similar strips of wet leather in her hand. From above, Feteror dully felt her tying bands around his arms and legs, a most strange experience.
The man who had been speaking to the elder came over. “The leather shrinks as it dries. It will take a few hours.” He pointed at the elder. “We put the bands on him two hours ago. It is beginning to dry. The sun will quicken this. You think you know pain now. Watch.”
As the sun came up, the elder began screaming, begging. The leather tightened down on his flesh, compressing all beneath. Something gave way in the old man’s legs and he gave forth an undulating cry that didn’t stop. For fifteen minutes it went on. A young man talked to the man who had spoken to Feteror. The man reluctantly nodded. The young man went over to the elder and slit his throat, stopping the cry.
“You will not be so lucky,” the man informed Feteror.
Feteror could tell that the straps were tightening. The pain was drawing him back to his body, something he fought with all his will.
Feteror began praying for death, calling on a God he knew only from the stories Opa had told him many years ago. He was back in his body as the agony reached levels he had never thought possible.
Through the pain, he heard something. Very distant. His eyes flickered up, his mouth wide open as he took careful breaths. Yes. He could hear it. He wondered why the mujahideen didn’t. The sound of helicopter blades cutting through the thin air.
One of the mujahideen was coming close, holding the red-hot knife just pulled out of the fire. But this time it was not to close a wound. Feteror pushed his head back against the stake as the man brought the knifepoint toward his face. Feteror ripped muscles in his neck, trying to avoid the knife. The man called for help in dealing with the Chyort, the devil man.
Two others ran up, grabbing his head and holding it still with all their strength as Feteror fought them with every once of energy he had left. The night had been too long, the damage too great. It was a lost battle.