by Lucy Taylor
Gerard grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back.
“That was good,” he said. “I’m proud of you. We’re off to a good start.”
Their next night in the deserted house, he again tied her to a beam, wrists secured over her head, and began to twist and squeeze her nipples. The pain was beyond anything she could have anticipated. She begged and pleaded, made promises of future acts of submission, but he increased the pressure. Then, because the pain was so unbearable and there was no escaping it, her body reacted by convulsing in a fit of laughter. She laughed and sobbed and, in between, implored Gerard to stop hurting her, but by the time he did her nipples had gone numb and, with the blood flowing again, the pain this time was greater than what she’d felt before.
He left her sobbing with fury at the pain and the futility of fighting it. When he returned, what seemed like hours later, he kissed her swollen nipples and fed her grapes he’d found growing in a nearby vineyard.
“Tell me how much you love me.”
“I hate you. You’re a monster.”
“Tell me how much you love everything I do to you.”
“Let me go. Please, just let me go.”
“There is nowhere to go. The plague is everywhere. There’s only death.”
She spat the chewed grapes out at him, spattering his face with sticky pulp, then caught his finger in her mouth and bit it to the bone.
He cradled his bleeding hand and eyed her coldly.
“I’d thought that you were doing well. I see now I was wrong. I must be stricter with you.”
He left her then, still tied, and came back brandishing a lit candle. At the first touch of the flame against her flesh, her courage failed her. She began to beg and weep, but Gerard was implacable. He moved the candle up and down her body, its shadow dancing across her flesh. Rarely did he let the fire make contact, but when he did, the agony elicited a howl. He singed a spot below her nipple, touched the flame to her thigh and the tender spot at the base of her spine, while she thrashed against her bindings.
“Tell me how much you like this! Tell me!”
The flame blazed in her face and burned her eyes. It filled her head with an unnatural light that grew brighter and brighter before exploding into darkness.
She dreamed she was a young child, ill with the fever that had swept through her village one winter, killing half a dozen babies and a few of the older children. Her mother had held her and sung her lullabies that had been handed down for centuries.
She had not gotten better right away. Instead, the fever had buoyed her along like a flooding stream, sweeping her far into the depths and byways and canyons of her mind, but, for the first time in her life, she had felt loved and safe, unafraid of the death the sickness seemed to be carrying her toward.
She opened her eyes.
He had cut her down from the beam and laid her on the bed. When she moved, the pain from her burns flared, making her gasp.
“Lie still,” he told her.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Shhh.”
He slid into the bed with her and spooned himself around her. His naked flesh was warm and comforting. When he cupped one hand around her breast and slid the other up between her legs, her sigh was both of pleasure and of resignation. His mouth roved over the back of her neck, his breath disturbed the tendrils of hair along her cheekbone, his tongue probed the delicate convolutions of her ear.
She turned and sobbed against his chest. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “The things I do may seem a strange way to win your love, but don’t forget I marched with the Brethren of the Cross. I know the sorcery that pain and then the absence of pain can work upon the mind. I know that pain can penetrate a heart that can’t be opened any other way.”
He held her and she clung to him and sobbed harder.
Knowing how desperately she wanted closeness, comforting, appalled at the price she was willing to pay for it.
She had escaped the plague, thought Gabrielle, in order to endure something worse – the ever-increasing torments Gerard devised for her.
Sometimes it was merely being bound in humiliating positions and left alone to wonder when or if he would return. Sometimes it was being spanked until her buttocks burned as if she’d sat upon hot coals, or having the wax from a lit candle dripped onto her breasts and thighs.
When he wasn’t using her, Gerard kept her bound much of the time and never let her move about freely without his supervision.
But sometimes, usually when the punishments had been most brutal, he would make love to her as though she were his heart’s desire – indeed he swore she was exactly that – soothing her bruised flesh with tender caresses, moistening her sore and swollen places with his tongue. And this she found almost more difficult to tolerate than the punishment, for she both longed for his sweet comforting and despised herself for craving it.
It was after just such a time, when Gerard had followed up his punishments by making love to her slowly and in silence, each move deliberate and delicate, as if they were underwater, that he fell asleep without remembering to tie her.
Gerard was snoring deeply, and from outside came the snarling and yapping of feral dogs, but the only sound that Gabrielle heard was her own heart racing at the possibility of escape. Nothing else mattered.
Outside the night felt vast and unforgiving, stars pulsing coldly overhead. She picked up a stick to ward off wild animals and started across a field toward a stand of trees, thinking to hide there until the sun rose.
She had gone only a short distance, though, when the sky sank so low it pressed against her head and the earth seemed to undulate and roll beneath her feet. The shadows of trees became the outlines of marauders come to ravish her and kill her. The sighing of the wind became the hiss of air leaking out of bloated corpses that she, unable to see, might tread on in the dark.
Never had she felt so vulnerable and desperate for solace. The memory of Gerard’s cruelties dissipated like fog. All she could think of was the softness of his kisses, the skillful pleasuring of his hands when he rewarded her endurance with some small kindness.
Near panic, she returned to the house, only to find Gerard waiting for her, brandishing a whip of the type used by the Flagellants.
“Ungrateful whore, is this how you show your love for me?” he said, but something in his voice made her believe it had all been a trick, that he had given her the chance to escape on purpose, either to test her or to seek an excuse for greater punishment.
How confident he’d been, if that were the case, she thought. How sure that she’d return.
No amount of begging could persuade him to forego the whip. He bound her wrists above her head and brought it down across her shoulders.
The pain devoured her, obliterating everything.
“Do you want more of this? Tell me you want more!”
“Yes!”
“Do you love me? Tell me how much you love me!”
“Yes, I love you, yes!”
The agony was terrible and breathtaking – it ripped the air out of her lungs and seared her flesh as though she were a witch burning at a pyre.
When it ended, her mind seemed to stop, to fog over with a pale, cool cloud of blissful nothingness.
Oh God, she thought, the pain has stopped. Oh God, oh God, ohGodohGodohGod . . .
Gerard pressed his mouth against her ear. “I’m here,” he said. “Don’t worry. Only a few more blows. I’ll help you get through it.”
Then the chorus of pain began again, the song of the whip mingling with that of her screams, carrying her down and down into a place beyond thought, beyond fear. Without dying, she had somehow ceased to exist. Her flesh did not belong to her, nor did her name – how could it when she no longer was – nor her past nor any thought at all. There was no room for name or past or thought in the brilliant, all-consuming clarity of her agony.
The god she called out to was no longer the God of the priests and penitents, but her
private god – Gerard, who gave and took away her suffering.
“There, now, it’s all right. It’s over now. It’s over.”
He untied her. She pressed her face against his chest and sobbed with gratitude. He had caused the pain to stop. He was her savior, her protector, how had she ever doubted him? When he began to kiss her, she kissed him back, then slid down his body, kissing every inch of him, anointing his skin with her tongue.
“I love you,” she said. Then, when he gave no reply, she added, “Now you must love me, too.”
To prove her devotion, Gabrielle worked diligently to please him. In bed, she acquiesced to every demand, and pleaded for new punishments. She prepared meals from whatever meager food was available, combing the orchards around the house for fruits, making salads of wild grasses. In the fields she picked the pale purple-blue flowers that her mother had so often pointed out to her, gathering the luscious-looking berries in her skirt.
In performing these small domestic tasks, it seemed to Gabrielle that, indeed, she felt real love for him, even as she made a salad of wildflowers and grasses and crushed the purple berries to make a pie.
In the night, Gabrielle woke to hear Gerard arguing loudly with someone. Alarmed, she lit a candle. No one was there. Her lover was sitting up in bed, conversing with great animation. The pupils of his eyes were dilated; his skin felt hot and dry. For an instant, she fancied she could hear the distant drumming of the Flagellants, then realized it was his heartbeat, audible at several feet.
“Harder, I can’t feel it!” he was shouting. “Harder! You must flog me harder!”
This went on for some time, before he fell into an exhausted, feverish sleep.
The hallucinations grew worse. Gerard imagined he saw whips descending and fires blazing at his feet. He cried out and flailed away at imaginary tormenters. So violent became his behavior that she was forced to tie him to the bed with the same ropes that he had used to bind her.
He complained his mouth was dry and that he couldn’t swallow, so she brought him water and put cool compresses across his brow. When she held and stroked his hand, she could feel his wildly beating pulse.
During a lucid phase, he said, “You could run away now. Why don’t you?”
“You need me,” she said, delicately licking the sweat from along his temple. “You wanted me to love you, and I do. If I can’t take away your pain, at least I can help you bear it.”
The days dragged on. Gerard was able to eat only a few spoonfuls of food, and his illness worsened. No spots disfigured his skin, no boils erupted along his groin, but still he grew ever weaker.
Gabrielle nursed him, fed him, kept him clean. At night she spooned herself around his back and stroked his chest and stomach, kissed his neck and outlined with her tongue the geography of scars that mapped his back.
When she had to leave him, if only for a moment, he would call out for her in fear.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said. “I saw the emptiness in your eyes and wanted you to feel something. I wanted you to need me. To love me.”
“I do love you,” said Gabrielle.
He squeezed her hand. “I thought that I was different, that somehow I’d escape the plague when everyone else was dying of it. I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I’d die of plague.”
“Nothing else I can promise you,” she said, stroking his face, “but this I do. You will not die of plague.”
Perhaps he even believed her, for he clutched her hand more tightly and kissed her fingers with desperation and desire.
He died later that night, holding tightly to her hand, voicing his undying love for her, even as his heartbeat grew so loud that the pounding filled the room. She had no energy for digging a grave, but dragged his body outside and left it for the dogs.
Some passers-by, headed east from Pisa, told her the plague still raged around her village, but Gabrielle no longer feared it. She had decided to return home to her father. She prayed he hadn’t died. If he was only ill, then she would nurse him. If he was healthy still, then she would win his love the way she had Gerard’s. She would crush more of the purple berries, the lovely, deadly nightbane berries that her mother’d always warned her of, and bake them in a pie. As with Gerard, she would feed him only small amounts, enough to provide a lingering and painful death, enough to give him time to well appreciate how lovingly she cared for him, how desperately he needed her, how exquisitely soothing was her touch.
She fantasized it as she began the journey home. How she would hold her father, stroke his brow, comfort him through his agony. How, at the end, he would pull her close and clutch her hand and tell her that he loved her.
BAUBO’S KISS
Lucy Taylor
IT WAS BEING angry at C.J. more than any spirit of adventure that drove Mira to go off alone to explore the island that day in early summer. Not that there was much to see on Kirinos. The small Ionian island was the sixth in a string of islands that she and C.J. had visited, some more flat or mountainous or lushly wildflowered than others, all redolent with heat and goat piss and retsina. So far, Kirinos was the least promising of the lot. Something about the people, Mira decided, as she pedaled the rented Schwinn along the dirt track that led away from the town. They seemed a glum and lifeless lot, not just more taciturn than the townsfolk she and C.J. had encountered on the other islands, but downright moribund.
The heat, perhaps, thought Mira, as sweat scrawled long itchy lines along the cracks between her breasts and buttocks. You could fry squid on the rocks here (and judging from some meals she’d had, maybe that was what they did), and it was barely ten o’clock.
Yet she pedaled on, determined to find something of interest or note to justify such an expenditure of energy on so blistering a day.
C.J.’s energy, as usual, was being vigorously conserved, unless you counted the hoisting of glass to lips to be a form of weight training. If so, Mira figured her lover would have set some sort of record for elbow-bending by the end of their vacation.
She’d left C.J. slouched at one of the ubiquitous waterfront tavernas, nursing a hangover with what, to Mira, seemed an unlikely remedy – a glass of ouzo and a plate of stuff ed grape leaves and taramosalata, a gummy-looking paste of smoked fish roe.
But then, despite what Mira thought was an unseemly love of drink and indolence, C.J. seemed to require no exercise to maintain a body that was both athletically lean and pleasingly curvaceous.
Whereas, I, thought Mira with not a little envy, could pedal from here back home to Scranton and still have a bum like a wench in a Bruegel painting.
Not for the first time, Mira wondered what C.J. saw in her – a fat and dowdy bookworm with plain, freckled features and eyes that squinted myopically from behind heavy lenses. Perhaps it was that C.J. felt her own good looks were shown to best advantage next to Mira’s plainness, that her own extroversion sparkled with more brilliance contrasted with Mira’s shyness, The idea of being a mere foil to highlight her lover’s sex appeal made Mira pedal harder, fueled by despair and self-disgust.
At leasts she thought, by way of preserving some modicum of self-esteem, I’m out and about, exploring something besides the beer and wine list.
Trying to, at any rate.
The reality was, so far at least, Kirinos seemed as stolid and uninviting as its citizenry. On both sides of the dirt track, olive groves stretched to a flat, unpromising horizon. Bands of scrawny, brown and white goats eyed Mira from the shade of stunted trees, but her passing was acknowledged only by a ribby dog, who came lunging at her rear tire with unnerving, if short-lived menace, before sensibly retreating to the shade.
Still, as her surroundings gave Mira more and more reason to feel discouraged, she pedaled resolutely on. She’d spent much of the last nine months cooped up in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, studying for an M.A. in Greek and Roman literature. Her pasty skin and pudgy thighs attested to her scholar’s dedication. Now she had three weeks of freedom before summer cla
sses started. Hot and weary though she might be, she wasn’t going to be like C.J. She was damn well going to see something on this trip besides the insides of tavernas.
An hour more into her trek, she passed a pair of girls herding a desultory tribe of goats along the roadside. Mira stopped and asked, in her limited Greek, what there might be of interest up ahead. The girls shared that look of dull slow-wittedness that Mira had come to recognize as characteristic of Kirinos’s inhabitants, a vacuity that suggested spirits no less desolate than the barren landscape.
The two girls conversed in low whispers before one said, in Greek the gist of which Mira was able to comprehend, “There’s the ruin of a temple close by, but you don’t want to go there. It isn’t safe.”
“It’s been abandoned for a long time,” the other said.
“A temple to the goddess Baubo,” said the first.
“Baubo?” Mira repeated, unfamiliar with the name.
A faint trace of slyness leaked into the first speaker’s large and bovine eyes, the closest thing to an expression of amusement that Mira had seen since coming to the island.
Mira wanted to question the women further, but the goats were straying, the girls obviously impatient to be on their way. Mira thanked them, hoping she had understood correctly, and pedaled on.
A few miles farther on, she walked her decrepit bike (no less ancient, however, than her legs were beginning to feel) up a steep hill topped by stands of poplars. Wind-flogged for their entire lives, the trees were permanently bent before their batterer, slanting out of the loose and rocky soil like broken bones set by a sadist, all weird twists and angles.
But for the grotesquely warped trees, the hilltop appeared as forlorn and barren as the rest of Kirinos, abandoned even by the wind today, but for a sluggish breeze.
And Baubo’s temple? If it existed at all (and Mira was beginning to imagine that she’d been sent on a wild-goose chase reserved for the most gullible of tourists – a Greek snipe hunt, as it were), it must be on still higher ground, well beyond the capacity of both her bike and calf muscles.
