Once more the cage. The corporal explained that custom decreed her being dragged through the streets at the end of a rope. But this he would not countenance. It was doubtful that would arrive alive. The bridge had been a valued asset. She had destroyed it. Angry merchants whose produce had not arrived on schedule might vent their national spleen… Dorinda herself was thankful for the cage.
But before she had been placed therein the corporal had completed a task not to his liking. It was not to Dorinda’s liking either. She suspected that it would be less and less. Her hands had been tied tightly with cord, palm to palm. Her elbows had been joined by two severe strands that cut into her flesh like burning coals. A strap was beyond bearing. These two bitter circlets were pure hell. Her eyes had pleaded. She had twisted her shoulders helplessly. She had asked him, begged him – quietly and without hysteria – to lighten the bonds that she must bear. He had kissed her nipples gently and told her that she must suffer. The people must see her suffer. It was expected. Sometimes a girl was whipped, or a hand cut off before she was killed. The bands around her elbows were merciful. She must be content.
She was not content. But she did what she must do. It was frightening to realise that this was real. She might be an unrecognised proxy. But to all intents and purposes she was going to her death. It was impossible not to feel, here and there for brief moments, that she was indeed Hulda Cohen going to pay with her life for a single bomb…
Once more the shaming dog collar and chain. How the crowd howled. She hated them, all of them and their turgid passions. There was not a man among them who would not give half of what he owned for the right to bed her. To take her now at this moment when she was near death and plant seed in a womb in which it could never flower. She knew instinctively that the short span of her life before her final choking death made her double desirable. To fuck a girl, vivid with life, a moment before she died! To what greater height could a man aspire?
The dreary route ran its course. She could not quell the thrill of fear as she saw the scaffold against the wall of Castle Rahbeal. There a girl was to die. But there was comfort in the enclosure below the trap. Comfort, too, in her memory that there was a lesser door in the wall within the limits of that enclosure. General Hakim had planned well.
The things men did to possess a woman’s body. This whole charade was for no other purpose than to enable a man to enjoy the body of a girl that was forfeit to the state. She was desirable to him because she fought. Because she was subject to the ultimate punishment. There was a for in Hulda that he sought to quench. Thus this whole play of which she was part. Thus the money that would enrich the house of Rabin. A dancing girl with equally functional vagina and breasts could have purchased for a fraction of the sum. Thus do men enslave themselves.
Dorinda fought her bonds in misery and wished a man might stand where she was now.
The crowd adored her. She was completely nude. That, too, had been apologetically insisted upon. Her nakedness bothered the corporal more than it did her. They howled and cheered her breasts. Lewd jokes she could not interpret were tossed back and forth about her physical attributes. Fingers made understandable reference to sexual friction in their pantomime. She had only to flutter her wracked shoulders to evoke instant response. If she truly struggled against her pain the multitude went wild. General Hakim’s circus made a most popular despot. Of such things are empires built. A girl’s pain might found a dynasty.
Poor corporal Kahdin. He lusted for her. She smiled to soothe the agony in his eyes. He was a nice boy. But he was not immune. Her jutting breasts, the thin cords bedding themselves in her female flesh had worked their mystery upon them. Like the crowd he was in the grip of a primordial lust against which he had no defence. He could not take her now. Dorinda wondered if there would be an afterwards.
The time came when her life must end. When her neck must pay for the bomb. She left nothing but pride as she was propelled up the scaffold steps. The populace was hysterical. Had Marie Antoinette felt this same thrill of mingled desolation and majesty as she went to the guillotine?
Farcically she could think of nothing but westerns as the noose was fitted around her neck. How many times had she seen just this that was now being done to her. The massive roll of cord that was supposed to break her neck. The innocent noose of rope that would choke her until she died with staring eyes and gaping mouth. An unknown man fitted these things upon her. But it was the hand of corporal Kahdin that lifted the rope before her eyes so that she might take heart in the obviously severed strands held together by the frailest bond. Dorinda saw it with great thankfulness and smiled at him with a gratitude she sincerely wanted to make real.
She was about to die! The rope felt rough around her neck. The anonymous fingers had drawn it tight enough that she could not be unaware of the thing that would take her life. She was positioned on the trap. Her ankles were tightly tied. What matter the circulation now. In a few moments it would have ended forever. She tried to move her hands, to separate her elbows.
Someone was reading from a paper. A great silence had fallen. Men looked stonily ahead. Women looked avid or shamed. A brusque command was given. The naked girl dropped out of sight.
For Dorinda the fall was a moment of pure terror. She had been bound so tightly that she could not influence the thing being done to her at all. As she felt the surface vanish from beneath her feet every nerve and sinew surged against the cords so cruelly embedded in her limbs. Her mouth opened in an involuntary cry of desolation that was choked back as the noose tightened upon her neck. In that flashing fraction of a second she met death.
Within the pit below the scaffold there was quiet efficiency. While the crowd outside howled its jubilation at the unseemly demise of a naked girl, two men worked with feverish haste. Corporal Kahdin caught Dorinda as she fell. The jerk of the severed rope was but a momentary hesitation. Her full weight must be cushioned. That he contrived to catch and hold the helpless package is his arms was a tribute to his strength. The package herself was so well bound and so petrified with fear that she could not help. She was all his. He accepted the glorious manna from heaven with reverence.
The corporal’s assistant must have rehearsed his task. The moment the rope parted he seized the dangling end and hung thereon to simulate the tension of a body in the throes of death. By way of giving the audience a bit extra for their money he bounced and twisted so that the rope, visible to all, conveyed its message of a jerking corpse.
Having placed his burden gently on the ground, the corporal attached a bag of sand to the loose end, thus relieving his helper who immediately picked up one end of the trussed girl, the corporal taking the other they deposited her in a coffin-like box and carried her through a small door to the interior of the fort. The execution was done.
"Congratulations, my dear. You have come through your ordeal nobly." General Hakim raised his glass. Reba held a similar potion to Dorinda’s lips. Both drank gratefully.
The cord had gone from her ankles but Dorinda’s shoulders were still painfully wracked by her joined elbows, the cords of which imposed a nagging agony.
"Could I please be untied, general?"
"Alas, non, my dear, you are too beautiful as you are," the general said cordially. "You must forgive a wretched man this last glimpse at paradise."
"Couldn’t you tie up Miss Cohen instead?" Dorinda twinkled at him. She was riding high on a wave of elation of being alive.
Hakim shook his head sorrowfully. "The poor girl does not possess the joi de vivre, your panache. I fear her only asset at the moment is a small death she dies every time I possess her." He sighed gently. "I fear her only love is a carton of dynamite."