Carnifex

20/8/469 AC

The wind blew sere down the high mountain pass. It carried on it the sound and stench of four hundred men, each slowly dying in excruciating agony. That was, after all, the source of the word "excruciating;" to suffer death on the cross.

This was only the second day after the crucifixions. For a few, it would be the last. Still others would last a day or two more. If they didn't already, the living would soon envy the dead.

To the low hill from which Carrera watched came a continuous sea of moans, cresting like waves and subsiding like the tides. One man in a corner would begin moaning, then three more wretches half out of their minds with pain would pick it up. The moans would then travel from one side of the cross-studded field, reach the other and begin to bounce back. Alternatively, a shriek might begin somewhere in the middle and be picked up and transmitted to the edges before coming back to center, not unlike the rippling of a pond when a stone is tossed to its center.

* * *

Abdul Aziz felt agony in the center of his chest. He felt it, too, in the wrists and hands and feet he knew were dead and blackening from lack of blood flow.

He was also tired beyond tired. Never in his life had he gone so long without sleep. Yet the art of the cross, a part of it, was that it permitted no sleep, no rest. He had tried to sleep, oh, many times. But each time he nodded off the inability to exhale sent him gasping for air, wide awake and pushing upward with his legs, in minutes. He was hungry, too, and thirsty. He'd begged a passing Pashtun Scout for water and been rewarded with spit on his face.

That was the key to crucifixion, the thing that made it the most horrible of deaths. Even a slow hanging choked off the windpipe so that, while the dying might dance a hornpipe beneath the gallows, trying desperately to find purchase for his feet and live, at least he was not able to beg. Crucifixion allowed begging, and pleading, and all manner of personal disgraces. Indeed, it required them. Worse than being slowly killed, for Abdul Aziz, was being quickly ashamed . . . and by his own words and deeds.

He tried to let his legs go, to make himself suffocate quickly. He could not. When the air in his lungs went foul he always pushed up to breathe, to live, if only to live in order to suffer. Others, he saw, also tried and also failed. They, like he, wept bitterly, their manhood stolen. Worse, in some ways, was that their illusions about being willing martyrs to the cause were stolen from them, as well. Believe as they might that a glorious future at the hand of God awaited them, still, in their weakness, they struggled to live. That theft of faith made them weep all the more.

* * *

Mustafa, of course, was not on a cross. Instead, he was "privileged," so some might say, to watch and listen as his followers died, to hear the cries coming from the Pashtun camp as his wives and daughters, and those of his followers, were forced to perform for their captors.

Shame, shame, all is shame, he mourned. All my honor is lost with my women turned to slaves and whores.

For Carrera had been cruel to Mustafa. He had had him brought and forced to watch the bidding as the Pashtun Scouts sold off the women and girls excess to their immediate needs to the whoremasters of Yamato and Doha. The bidding had been fierce at times as they were stripped and shown off on the rude auction block set up to one side of the mass of crosses.

Even the souls of my youngest children are forfeit as they will be converted into Nazrani. I've lost everything.

Mustafa glared his hate at Carrera, sitting there smug and apparently cheerful as he quaffed his sinful drink. Carrera noticed Mustafa's glare and raised his glass in salute.

"You might have won, you know, old boy," Carrera taunted, loudly enough for the Salafi to hear. "The margin of victory for the Federated States in Sumer was that close, close enough that without my legion added to the mix they probably would have lost or given up in war-weariness. You saved them from that by freeing me to help them. Congratulations on earning your place in history."

Mustafa had learned enough about Carrera's personal history to understand that this might be so. It made him sick to his stomach to think that he had caused all this himself.

Even so, he still could not see that he had created Carrera, or freed the monster within him, at any rate. Cause and effect were confused within his mind. At a purely emotional level—and in this, at least, Mustafa was intensely human—all the harm that had been done to him existed in one part of his mind as if it had always been there, while the harm he had done, in turn, seemed very small and very late. And only just.

You don't really understand do you? Carrera asked silently, looking intently into Mustafa's face for some sign of comprehension. He found none. Oh, well; it's the common lot of humanity and always has been. In the mid to late twentieth century on Old Earth, Japanese deeply resented the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They forgot their own previous attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the murders of guiltless prisoners. Conversely, Americans remembered that attack, would continue to remember it for centuries, and justified the nuking of two cities by it. The Americans, in their own turn, forgot that they had been in the process of turning Japan back to the stone age, prior to Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese had struck. The Japanese remembered the embargo, the freezing of credit, and the threat. They invariably forgot the brutal murdering, raping and thieving sojourn in China which well predated the American embargoes.

Carrera understood, even if Mustafa did not. This was mankind's way from times immemorial. People measured right and wrong, typically, as a function of whose ox was being gored, and when. What our side did was good and justifiable and therefore what the other side did was evil and reprehensible. Salafis, even on Terra Nova, still harked back to the loss of Spain to the Reconquista. They rarely if ever remembered that they had stolen Spain in the first place. It was a form of Orwellian double think, but one that required no party Pravda to bring about.