The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Elizabeth Cunningham
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CHAPTER TWELVE
I have been publicly naked before. I am not particularly distressed by it. But being chained to a wall, blind-folded, with my bare ass exposed to a room full of people, gave nakedness a whole new dimension. To distract myself from my condition, I focused on sound and smell. Yes, smell. Food was being served, scents wafting past me as slaves carried meats and pastries. There was a cacophony of voices, male and female, becoming louder as wine flowed. Clearly I was on display—perhaps the centerpiece of some midday banquet? The dessert? The entertainment?
“Does Claudius always put new slaves on view to his guests?”
Some man had come closer, and I could smell his breath. He must have eaten a raw onion for breakfast. I wished he wouldn’t breathe on my neck.
“Never seen him do it before,” replied his companion, whose voice I recognized from the Vine and Fig Tree. A senator. What else. One of Berta’s regulars. “Not a bad idea, what? Teach them their place right away. This one looks rather fat and sassy. Maybe she needs a lesson.”
“I can think of other methods.”
“So can I. And if there weren’t ladies present, I’d demonstrate. Wouldn’t I just love to spread those luscious cheeks and take a plunge.”
They both sniggered like the overgrown schoolboys they were.
“Damn,” said the first man. “You can’t hide anything under these togas.”
“I know. I’ve got one, too. Nothing to be ashamed of. Give the ladies something to talk about.”
“I hear the lady of the house talks of little else.”
They both laughed in absurd appreciation of each other’s puerile wit as they moved away, presumably to recline at table. The feasting began in earnest and went on interminably. Still weak from my illness, I was also hungry. I’d had nothing to eat since the bread and wine I’d barely touched that morning. Added to all my other discomforts was a bladder near bursting. I gave my mind to a serious question. Would it be more humiliating to me or more insulting to the banqueters if I made a puddle on the floor? This dilemma distracted me from graver questions such as: where the hell was I and what was to become of me?
The answers came all too soon.
“May I have your attention please,” commanded a male voice.
An excited hush fell. How did I know it was excited? My senses and extra senses were heightened. Let’s say I could smell it.
“My very dear friends,” the man continued, jovial and pompous in equal measure, “I’m pleased to inform you that we have arranged an entertainment for you today. Like all the best entertainments, it is also designed to be morally instructive and uplifting.”
Morally instructive. Not a good sign. That meant I couldn’t get by with tap-dancing—or lap-dancing, either.
“We are all only too aware of the dangers posed to decent society by rebellious slaves. If you let a slave get away with one transgression, it leads to another and another, until you find yourself one day with a blade between your ribs, a cup of poison at your lips, or a full scale insurrection in your kitchen and stables.”
His listeners were getting worked up. Shouts of “Well said!” and “Hear! Hear!” punctuated his stagey pauses.
“Masters who do not chastise slaves endanger us all in our very homes, in our very beds. This insolent vixen insulted a lady, a very important lady: my wife. And this outrage went unpunished by the vicious slut’s former mistress. As for me and my house, we now accept the full burden of responsibility for this depraved creature’s moral rehabilitation. So great is my wife’s concern for the safety of honest Roman citizens that she herself will administer the first lashes.”
Cheers and applause greeted this announcement. A typical wanker’s fantasy, I thought dismissively, forgetting for a moment that here—unlike at the Vine and Fig Tree—I had no control over how to play it out.
Then someone breathed damply in my ear.
“It’s me.”
Oh shit. Oh no. Oh yes. Of course. The bitch.
She pressed herself against my back, her breasts filling the hollows under my shoulder blades. Her nipples were hard enough to prick me.
“Do you know what I’m going to whip you with,” she whispered throatily. “A bull’s pizzle. A big, long, thick bull’s pizzle.”
How could Domitia Tertia do this to me? How could she? She called this saving me? When I could have died in a salt mine—a swift, simple end.
The crowd was getting restless. “Have at her, domina. Go on. Teach her a lesson she’ll carry with her on her back.”
“But take care not to scar that delectable rump,” someone shouted.
All the men brayed like the asses they were.
I narrowed my focus. Bladder control. The question was now settled. “Never piss yourself in front of the enemy,” Queen Maeve of Connacht had advised me long ago. I called upon her memory for strength. The first lash tore into my back to the cheers and applause of the crowd. I sucked in my breath and squeezed tight the muscles of my twat as skillful whores learn to do. Soon the crowd became silent, entranced no doubt by the sound of the whip singing in the air, cracking across my flesh. I made no sound, and after my first flinch, no movement. I had learned a thing or two at druid school and distracted myself from the pain by reciting in my head from Invasions, the beginning of the story cycles first year students learn by heart.
I barely noticed when the woman tired and turned the whip over to someone else. Soon I stopped waiting for the lashes to end. The rhythmic lines of poetry came to life, and I was on the battlefield with blood and pain all around and the death crows screaming overhead. At last someone carried me off the field, dead or alive, I didn’t know or care.
When I woke up, lying on my stomach in a dark, cold place, still naked, except for a thin blanket someone had thrown over me, I knew I was alive. Being dead could not hurt this much. My back was inflamed and at the same time stiff and immobile. I pulled my thighs and knees up under my belly, and then I slowly sat up. The blanket stuck to the wounds on my back. Suddenly I felt so helpless and alone, I broke down and wept.
I was still weeping when a woman came in with a torch, which she set in a holder. I could see now that I was in a storage room full of oil jugs and grain sacks. The woman, a lower rank slave in a plain tunic, knelt next to me and handed me a flask of wine laced with something else, drugs for the pain, I hoped. She waited while I took a drink. Then lightly—so lightly—she touched my shoulder, rose and disappeared, returning with a basin of scalding water. With her hands and some kind of knife perhaps—I couldn’t see—she removed the blanket and began to bathe my wounds—an excruciating relief. When she had thoroughly washed me; she rubbed a soothing salve all over my back. Last she pulled out from her tunic some fresh bread that she pressed into my hands. Only after she had left did it dawn on me that she had never spoken a word.
I must have slept again. When I woke there was a little light coming in through small barred upper windows. I could see and hear feet passing by outside. As I had guessed, I was in a basement storeroom. Just before I mounted the slave block, I had been stowed in the back of a fish shop. Perhaps the bitch was planning to sell me again, now that she’d had the satisfaction of beating me. With these wounds on my back—the mark of a recalcitrant slave—I’d be sold to the salt mines, anyway.
The slave who’d tended me last night had left me a slop bucket. As I got up to use it, I heard the sound of a door being unbolted, opened, then bolted again. In a moment the woman appeared,