The woman Morwenna was coming up the steps, preceded by the alcalde and followed by a man with an iron spit who used it to prod her. Someone in the crowd shouted an obscene suggestion.
“…have mercy on those who had no mercy. Have mercy on us, who shall have none now.”
The caloyer was finished, and the alcalde began. “Most hatefully and unnaturally…”
His voice was high, quite different both from his normal speaking voice and the rhetorical tone he had adopted for the speech outside Barnoch’s house. After listening absently for a few moments (I was looking for Agia in the crowd), it struck me that he was frightened. He would have to witness everything that was done to both prisoners at close range. I smiled, though my mask concealed it.
“…of respect for your sex. But you shall be branded on the right cheek and the left, your legs broken, and your head struck from your body.” (I hoped they had had sense enough to remember that a brazier of coals would be required.)
“Through the power of the high justice laid upon my unworthy arm by the condescension of the Autarch — whose thoughts are the music of his subjects — I do now declare… I do now declare…”
He had forgotten it. I whispered the words: “That your moment has come upon you.”
“I do now declare that your moment has come on you, Morwenna.”
“If you have pleas for the Conciliator, speak them in your heart.”
“If you have pleas for the Conciliator, speak them.”
“If you have counsels for the children of women, there will be no voice for them after this.”
The alcalde’s self-possession was returning, and he got it alclass="underline" “If you have counsels for the children of women, there will be no voice for them after this.”
Clearly but not loudly, Morwenna said, “I know that most of you think me guilty. I am innocent. I would never do the horrible things you have accused me of.” The crowd drew closer to hear her.
“Many of you are my witnesses that I loved Stachys. I loved the child Stachys gave me.”
A patch of color caught my eye, purple-black in the strong spring sunshine. It was such a bouquet of threnodic roses as a mute might carry at a funeral. The woman who held them was Eusebia, whom I had met when she tormented Morwenna at the riverside. As I watched her, she inhaled their perfume rapturously, then employed their thorny stems to open a path for herself through the crowd, so that she stood just at the base of the scaffold. “These are for you, Morwenna. Die before they fade.”
I hammered the planks with the blunt tip of my blade for silence. Morwenna said, “The good man who read the prayers for me, and who has talked to me before I was brought here, prayed that I would forgive you if I achieved bliss before you. I have never until now had it in my power to grant a prayer, but I grant his. I forgive you now.”
Eusebia was about to speak again, but I silenced her with a look. The gap-toothed, grinning man beside her waved, and with something of a start I recognized Hethor.
“Are you ready?” Morwenna asked me.
“I am.”
Jonas had just set a bucket of glowing charcoal on the scaffold. From it thrust what was presumably the handle of a suitable inscribed iron; but there was no chair. I gave the alcalde a glance I intended to be significant. I might have been looking at a post. At last I said, “Have we a chair, Your Worship?”
“I sent two men to fetch one. And some rope.”
“When?” (The crowd was beginning to stir and murmur.)
“A few moments ago.”
The evening before he had assured me that everything would be in readiness, but there was no point in reminding him of that now. There is no one, as I have since found, so liable to fluster on the scaffold as the average rural official. He is torn between an ardent desire to be the center of attention (a position closed to him at an execution) and the quite justified fear that he lacks the ability and training that might enable him to comport himself well. The most cowardly client, mounting the steps in the full knowledge that his eyes are to be plucked out, will in nineteen cases from a score conduct himself better. Even a shy cenobite, unused to the sounds of men and diffident to the point of tears, can be better relied on.
Someone called, “Get it over with!”
I looked at Morwenna. With her famished face and clear complexion, her pensive smile and large, dark eyes, she was a prisoner likely to arouse quite undesirable feelings of sympathy in the crowd.
“We could seat her on the block,” I told the alcalde. I could not resist adding, “It’s more suited to that anyway.”
“There’s nothing to tie her with.”
I had permitted myself a remark too many already, so I forbore giving my opinion of those who require their prisoners bound.
Instead, I laid Terminus Est flat behind the block, made Morwenna sit down, lifted my arms in the ancient salute, took the iron in my right hand, and, gripping her wrists with my left, administered the brand to either cheek, then held up the iron still glowing almost white. The scream had silenced the crowd for an instant; now they roared.
The alcalde straightened himself and seemed to become a new man. “Let them see her,” he said.
I had been hoping to avoid that, but I helped Morwenna to rise. With her right hand in mine, as though we were taking part in a country dance, we made a slow, formal circuit of the platform. Hethor was beside himself with delight, and though I tried to shut out the sound of his voice, I could hear him boasting of his acquaintance with me to the people around him.
Eusebia held up her bouquet to Morwenna, calling, “Here, you’ll need these soon enough.”
When we had gone once around, I looked at the alcalde, and after the pause necessitated by his wondering at the occasion for the delay, received the signal to proceed.
Morwenna whispered, “Will it be over soon?”
“It is almost over now.” I had seated her on the block again, and was picking up my sword. “Close your eyes. Try to remember that almost everyone who has ever lived has died, even the Conciliator, who will rise as the New Sun.”
Her pale, long-lashed eyelids fell, and she did not see the upraised sword. The flash of steel silenced the crowd again, and when the full hush had come, I brought the flat of the blade down upon her thighs; over the smack of it on flesh, the sound of the femurs breaking came as clear as the crack, crack of a winning boxer’s left-hand, right-hand blows. For an instant Morwenna remained poised on the block, fainted but not fallen; in that instant I took a backward step and severed her neck with the smooth, horizontal stroke that is so much more difficult to master than the downward.
To be candid, it was not until I saw the up-jetting fountain of blood and heard the thud of the head striking the platform that I knew I had carried it off. Without realizing it, I had been as nervous as the alcalde.
That is the moment when, again by ancient tradition, the customary dignity of the guild is relaxed. I wanted to laugh and caper. The alcalde was shaking my shoulder and babbling as I wished to myself; I could not hear what he said — some happy nonsense. I held up my sword, and taking the head by the hair held it up too, and paraded the scaffold. Not a single circuit this time, but again and again, three times, four times. A breeze had sprung up; it dotted my mask and arm and bare chest with scarlet. The crowd was shouting the inevitable jests: “Will you cut my wife’s (husband’s) hair too?”
“Half a measure of sausage when you’re done with that.”
“Can I have her hat?”