by Victor Allen
oppression of the Ottoman empire was slowly eroding, and it was a time to celebrate.
I am not sinless now and was less so then. Calling me a cad would have been a kindness. I found her as seductive and bewitching then as I do now, and she, me. Leave aside that I had a wife and children at home. Being with her was like dancing on knives, or walking through fire, or diving headlong from a precipice. She was as wild and unbroken as the nail marks she clawed into my back, and I looked with more than eagerness to the times I could steal away and feel the heat of her body against mine, or bury my face in her hair, or run my fingers down the pink bloom of her cheek, or hear her laugh. And she made me laugh, too. She was hot-blooded and hot-tempered, unbridled and full of life in a time when life was cheaper than dirt. She was the drug that made my life worth living in a part of dismal, seventeenth century Europe which had yet to be lit by the newly budding Renaissance. It was a place where familiars still prowled and witches were hanged. It was the black time; the Burning Times.
Then, as now, she was a closed book. What I knew of her life when she wasn't with me was a secret. And so it was that her secrets didn't sit well with others of the town. Such beauty, they whispered cattily among themselves, was not natural. That she was unmarried and childless was the pinnacle of scandal. It was rumored, far and wide, that she had dishonorable liaisons. She was a free-spirited threat to the town's loathsome, swamp-donkey women, heartless harridans, and court eunuch, Pope's whores, clown-suited as the town council, whose piety stretched a mile wide and an inch deep. And they intended to punish her for it.
I was nearly caught many times, but managed to steal away when discovery was at hand. Our trysts were always at night and nobody got a really good look at me. But tongues started wagging. Where was she when the Great Cat that had begun to plague the town was seen? Livestock had been slaughtered, children frightened. The attempt was a ham-fisted one to paint her as a familiar. Wallachia was home only to some rather small, wild cats, nothing so large as a cougar or a panther. No-one I knew had seen such a cat, and I dismissed it as political theater, but the seed for her destruction had been planted. Wallachia had thrown off the shackles of the Sultans only to hang the anvil of the Holy Roman Emperor around its neck, with its inquisitions and imprisonment of heretics, and its burning and hanging of witches.
I couldn't discount the stories entirely. Indeed, I was not with her every moment and knew nothing of her life outside of our time together. In one of my only noble gestures, I tried to persuade her to leave, at least for a while, until things had settled, but she refused. I told her that powerful forces were aligning against her. They meant to have her head, and I couldn't help her. My job was such that I couldn't be associated with her and risk not only myself, but my family. Like Icarus, I was only a man, with wings of wax, and I was flying too close to the sun, about to plunge into the killing sea with her.
She didn't want to listen as I tried to explain the ugly realities of life to her. I don't think she really believed it could be that bad, and was content to think that everything would, somehow, turn out alright.
I wasn't there when she was arrested at the tavern and hauled away, charged with adultery and witchcraft. She was tried and convicted that night in a candle-lit sham of a drumhead court, convened specifically for that reason. The judge made his pronouncement and she was sentenced to hang the very next afternoon, when the crowd would be the largest. Yet when I heard, I didn't protest. I had too much to lose.
The assemblage was restless the next afternoon as she was rudely shoved up onto the rickety gallows, its unsound wood gray and sad, the hooded hangman standing by. I saw confusion and hurt in her eyes more than fear, the sadness that was the lovelorn's unhappiest harvest. The whispers flew amongst the crowd. Who was it? Why didn't she tell? What kind of a coward would let a good woman, if indeed she were good, to suffer the gallows and not reveal himself? She looked into the crowd, her scared eyes searching for me, perhaps expecting me to step forward and put an end to this. But she never saw me. No eye, neither hers nor the crowd's, fell upon me. I was invisible and beyond suspicion. I was respected and respectable with a good, necessary job. A decent, family man with children and a loving wife.
There were catcalls and tears, advocates of her good nature and detractors out for innocent blood. I suppose I was the last one to see the hopelessly lost look of betrayal in her eyes before the hood was placed over her head and the noose secured. It was this, this look in her eyes, that I had recognized those many centuries later. The crowd quieted as the moment approached and I heard her softly sobbing beneath the hood: small as a child, her fragile wrists bound with thick coils of rope, alone, and finally afraid. The lever groaned back with a clank, the trap door banged and clattered.
Then the drop.
As I said, I didn't sleep last night and I didn't expect to hear her laugh today when I came to the store, working the twelve-thirty to nine shift. And I didn't. Perhaps it was one of her days off, but I didn't think so. Some things weigh like a black spot on your heart and I knew it was going to be my last day. I even thought about going around and saying goodbye to everyone at work, but I didn't. The only one I wanted to see was already gone. The place seemed downright cheerless without her laughter, and I knew now it was best for her when she laughed alone. I walked around my department, turning out the lights. When the shop door closed behind me, it was already dark and I didn't even look in my rear view mirror when I got into my car.
On the drive home, I pondered over why she never outed me, but I can't dwell on it for long, because the only answer that makes any sense is too bittersweet and shameful for me to deal with:
Maybe -just maybe- she loved me.
I didn't sleep as I lay down, because I was thinking. They say each trip back is a chance to improve yourself and I hoped that, in this life, at least, I was a better man. That this time I would do better by her than I did the last.
The screams are very close tonight, coming from just beneath my back porch, close enough that if I got up to look, I would see her on the ground, looking up. But I stayed in bed, listening as she scaled the tree by my back porch and landed on the roof with an easy creaking of wood. The soft thud of padded paws thumped lightly on the sill as she slipped through the open window, the curtains silent silk gliding along her back. I heard the catty fall of her pads as they crossed the room next to mine, tolling like the tell-tale heart that beats accusingly beneath the bed of every villain. I felt the sinewy weight as she crawled up onto my bed like a serpent, the sultry heat of her body as she nestled down beside me, a thing I had looked forward to in happier circumstances lifetimes ago.
I feel the warm fog of her respiration on my neck, the wet, black-velvet nose on my cheek. The soft growling and intake of breath -almost like a purr, or a low chuckle- are directly in my ear. I turn my wide eyes to see her final embodiment: Fur black, like her hair, green in eye and red of tongue, white in tooth and claw. So this is what happens when the world goes pear-shaped, the trap drops, and your life is whittled down to a few, final ticks of breathless anticipation. I wonder if I will see her ears laid back, or hear the snarl as she lunges for the killing strike.
Because all things come around in their own good time; all debts get paid in this life or another, and I wouldn't beg for redemption, even if I wanted to.
You see, I was her executioner.
And I miss her laugh.
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