Chapter 12

It was later - and I don't know how much later because I haven't a watch - that I heard the soldiers outside, the steady tread of their leather shoes upon stone. It came from the path leading to the cave entrance. I remember, many years ago, that people used to walk that way often, but then the steps became less frequent, and I haven't heard them at all for a number of years now and so I suspect that the path has become overgrown and lost and given back to the wild.

"You said that no one ever comes through the door!" Christine hissed from her stupor, hearing the sound and at once beginning to panic. She couldn't move. She was weak from hunger and fear. "Please, monsieur. I'll do anything you want of me. Whatever you say. But you mustn't let them take me! Not the guillotine! Please don't let them know that I'm here."

I clutched her hand reassuringly, pulling her close. Her breasts were sticky with cum because I'd wiped it into them and she'd made no attempt to wash my semen away.

I raised a finger to my mouth, for there was no reason yet to be alarmed, to believe that these people had any inclination to open the door.

Silently we listened to their voices, their strange accents, their bad-tempered inflection. I heard swearing, bad jokes, and then the clink of a key.

It didn't fit.

Oh Jesus. I was frightened now.

Who were they?

Whoever they were, they had another key and they were trying this one also in the lock.

It didn't fit.

"You said no one uses the door," Christine whispered. "What's going on? Who are they?"

My heart beat wildly. "Let me do the talking," I hissed back; hearing, listening. Another key, and this one turned. It was stiff. The door needed oiling. But it turned.

Oh Jesus.

Where had they got these keys from? Who were they?

Christine screamed. She tried not to scream and the noise became tangled in her mouth from the moment it left her throat, cut off by her fear, but I heard it. I heard it in my head and my soul. This was the worst of her nightmares. She was to be found in my cave: naked, starving, vulnerable, and about to be carted off to the guillotine. "Shut up!" I barked at her, pulling my decaying jacket around her nakedness, and covering up the worst of her gauntness. "Just follow along with what I say."

The door opened slowly to reveal the outlines of two men, commoners, one tall, the other squat; one with a sword, the other with a pike. They were bathed in brilliant white sunlight and my eyes were stung instantly by its intensity and strangeness and I couldn't endure it. It was like someone was pricking at my eyes with sharp needles.

I couldn't bear it, couldn't face it, and suddenly, in one easy stroke my slipshod planning was undone.

What good is it if you can see the future but not see the light?

I was instantly wrong footed and afraid, hurting. Blinded. Disabled. I howled in despair and fled from those inquisitors to the sanctuary of the rooms at the back of my cave.

"No!!" Christine shrieked, clinging to me, clutching frantically with her small tender hands and sensing my betrayal. With no other point of reference, she'd learned to trust me, to hope in me, to have faith.

"I have faith," she'd said.

Foi de la Vierge!

I remember her sagging breasts and her big screaming nipples as she clung despairingly to my leg and to the last vestiges of belief. "Don't leave me! Please!" she screeched as I shook my leg free of her grasp.

She was suddenly convinced that I must have been deceiving her from the very beginning for I'd promised to spare her from the indignity these soldiers and yet I was cruelly giving her up to their cocks and their spears and the dreaded guillotine at her weakest, lowest moment.

But I wasn't doing it deliberately. Not at all. Even now, back in the nether parts of the cave, I fought to clear my mind and my eyes, to think, to see, for I hadn't expected such fierce bright light. What had happened? Was that the outside? Was it heaven? Was I now blind?

"Shit!" one of the soldiers snorted, pinching his nose. He was the one with the sword. "What a stench! It's worse than a sewer in here."

It took a while for him to grow used to the darkness and for me to grow accustomed to the light, and during that time I came back from my hiding place to Christine, feeling braver - but I was also vomiting over the ground while trying to make out as much as I could.

I saw that one of the soldiers was short and rotund, his belly flopping over the top of his trousers. His face was the color of beetroot. The other man was skinny, tall, with the nose of a Jew and the face of a Devil.

But mostly they were hazy. I still couldn't see them. My eyes were watering, stinging. I couldn't see...

Oh God.

I deduced that these must be brigands; the criminal thugs that Christine had warned me about, men who wore no uniform and expressed no loyalty either to cause or country. These types were brutes, criminals, bullies: the kind that prospers in times of anarchy.

I kept to the shadows, out of the way, but then I saw that one of the soldiers was dragging a woman in his wake. She was wearing a green satin dress with a tight, pointed bodice. The neck was cut square and low, and the front had been meddled with. It was torn. The buttons were open and the breasts were exposed. They were grey, dirty, scratched.

The two of them lifted her to the back of the cave and they lay her on a shelf on her back. Then the first soldier straightened her and he reverentially made a sign of the cross in the direction of the stiff, unmoving body.

For a while I didn't move. I just watched.

She was stunning: a brunette, maybe thirty years. The sleeves of her gown were tight to the elbow, where they finished with several ruffles of lace; the neck was also edged with lace, and a narrow ruffle finished the edge of the vest.

Then the second soldier laid the woman's head alongside her body and I looked at her hair. It was curled and piled on the top of the head, and encircled with a band of ribbon and a wreath of roses. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks were like snow.

Her hands were still tied behind her back and her legs were wrapped together with rope in a simple futile attempt to preserve her modesty.

At this point the soldiers wandered about the cave, fearlessly looking here and there and it didn't take them long to discover Christine and I. We were together, holding hands, lying on adjacent slabs and staring up at the ceiling and the thousands of stalactites that waited patiently to fall down on us, and at first it seemed that the soldiers hadn't seen us. They looked right through us without making sense of what it was they were seeing. But then they became unsure and uncertain. They looked at Christine with incredulity, for she had only my jacket covering what remained of her modesty.

"Who left her like that?" the tall one said, looking at her lice infected hair and non-existent breasts. "Where's the respect?"

But the other one was looking straight to Christine's open hole, and there was a dark smirk to his face.

I knew exactly what he was anticipating. So did Christine. She couldn't look at him. She knew that he was planning to fuck her, to have her, and I was immediately jealous.

"Lleave her! Shs ... she's ... m daughter, my daughter," I said abruptly, feigning slow-wittedness.

Jesus, what was up with me? What was going on? Why was I doing this? Why was I bothering? Christine was nothing to me. She was the daughter of my enemy.

And yet she was my soul mate in death, my wife, and I was determined to defend her honor.

The one with the pike raised his weapon and seemed surprised that I'd spoken. He thrust the pike towards me, warning me off, but I refused to cower which annoyed him. He was going to hit me, but then, fortunately, his friend intervened and so he hit Christine instead.

"I heard of this guy," he interrupted, kicking my slop bucket and checking its contents. He dropped it in disgust, choking and swearing. "Some of the old timers claim to have seen him. He was a psycho and a rapist and a murderer. No woman was safe in his company, they said - and when they hanged him, it took him an hour to die."

Christine crawled across the floor, wailing like a banshee from the pain of being hit with the pike, and then she fell awkwardly onto her belly and she had to lift herself by her hands, but she hadn't the strength.

The soldiers watched her, unfussed, enjoying the spectacle, for Christine was going nowhere and they knew it. They stood behind her, prodding and poking her with every false step, focusing on her ass because my jacket didn't cover it a jot and they could see everything she had. "He's something of a legend," the shorter one said, slapping Christine's bruised butt with the flat of his sword. Then he twisted it through ninety degrees and poked her with the tip of it, a grin filling his face at Christine's immediate howl. "After he killed them, then he used to cut them up and cook them. Can you believe that?"

"That's rank," the other one said. He had several black teeth bordering much larger gaps, and he now began to jab Christine with the tip of his pike as his friend had done with his sword. "Fuck she's his daughter!" he jeered, stabbing her again. "Look at that ass!"

He grabbed Christine by my jacket and pulled her up sharply, and she came part way, twisting around, but then the jacket disintegrated and she fell back to the ground with a bang, bleeding and wailing in misery. Even so, she was trying frantically to cover her breasts.

"Come here, bitch!" the tall one barked, hoisting her up by her arm, ignoring that she was attacking him with her foot and the rake of her nails. She shrieked because he slapped her and because of the pain of the sword and the pike.

"What happened to your ass?" he hissed.

"My f ... father hit me," she sobbed, shutting her eyes. "I was horny and I ... I touched..." She pointed delicately towards her bare pussy. "F ... Father says I mustn't fuck myself. He says that I must wait for him to do it."