The Execution (2 page)

Then he would finally be left alone,
to pray and take communion within the confines of the church. This
notion was selfish—he knew this, and he would take his escape in a
heartbeat when the time came. For now, however, he would be a good
priest, as good as he could be. If it pleased God, perhaps there
would be mercy, and D’ata would be granted his final
indulgence.

For some reason, this gave him no
peace tonight. His mood blackened for he knew to wish for the
passage of time was dangerous. The soul lives to experience the
moment. To bleed is to live. A terrible color, though—red. If he
could just forget that color...

He paused in his tracks, reached up
and gently touched his right temple with the first two fingers of
his hand. He was uncomfortable. His thoughts tormented him and his
feet were leaden. It seemed that his heart sagged in his chest. It
was like that fall-too-fast feeling which happens when, as a child,
you jump from too high a spot and your body outruns your heart. It
was very disagreeable and he tried to shrug the feeling off. ‘Must
just be the night air,’ he reasoned.

He glanced back for a moment and
thought he saw another clandestine traveler behind him, but the
shadow turned out to be only a vapor in the night, disappearing
into thin air. He shrugged and walked on.

For now, it was to the dungeons, and
he dreaded the job ahead of him. He detested laying eyes upon those
miserable creatures, smelling their filth and half-listening to
their confessions, blasphemies, and complaints. It disrespected
humanity, and it disrespected her.

A pang of guilt stabbed at him. God
would disapprove of his lack of compassion. He made a mental note
to include this in his evening prayers and Saturday confessions.
‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned—again.’

Monsignor Leoceonne would not treat
him kindly for penance, though D’ata knew the Monsignor felt
generally the same as he about the task. The older priest had
reason to give him stiff penance at the slightest fault, for the
younger man had a tormented history of severe transgressions to be
sure. It was a history everyone knew, but no one spoke
of.

D’ata took a deep breath as the shame
of his past snuck briefly into his wandering thoughts, and he
groaned aloud. Peculiar how he did that—softly, involuntarily, but
definitely a groan. It always happened when the unthinkable would
lay siege to his subconscious and claim a thought for itself. He
could never predict when it would happen, and it made him pause on
his journey tonight, head bowed with fists clenched to his
forehead. He struggled, forcing the thoughts away, preferring the
morbid present to the horrible anguish of his past.

‘
Please, God. Make the
memories go away...if you will just take them away.’

Finally, he relaxed a bit, his feet
started to move again, and his journey continued.

D'ata climbed the long hill to the
castle with a slow, tedious step. As he crossed the portcullis and
approached the enormous, dark facade, he paused to touch it,
allowing his hand to pass over the rough, cold stones. They
appeared to weep in the dampness of the night, perhaps for the
unfortunate men they imprisoned. Ice cold tears they must be—tears
for the dying.

The skirts of his robes were wet a
good hands-breath up the hem, but the rains had ceased for
now.

Climbing the steps of the massive
fortress, he lifted the heavy wooden knocker, pounding twice on the
soggy door. The dull hammering echoed behind him, causing him to
glance back again.

He shivered, squinting back into the
distance from where he'd just come. The fog pushed in, rolling down
the streets, claiming for itself the space from which the rain had
withdrawn. Castillon was a beautiful town on a sunny day. Tonight,
though, D’ata hardly recognized it.

Glancing up, he tried to make out the
stars, briefly considering how others must look at the stars just
as he did. Other people in other towns, perhaps watching the same
sky at this very moment. Sometimes it was his way of escaping, by
thinking about these strangers, so far away. His problems didn’t
exist where they were—if only he could find his way there. Of
course, he’d tried that once, with awful consequence.

His gaze fell to the little town and
he tried to make out the sea beyond, but the fog forbade him
tonight.

The gates creaked on their hinges,
startling him from his far away thoughts. A middle-aged guard with
disheveled hair, his cheek deeply wrinkled from his slumber,
finally answered the knock. His breath was a putrid mix of ale and
sloth. D’ata turned his head away from the stench.

Waving the priest in, his wrist
disjointed and floppy with his drunkenness, the guard guided the
holy man through a maze of corridors. Mumbling about the ungodly
hour, though it was barely past dinner, he led D’ata to one of the
two towers, adjacent to the donjon.

They passed through a heavy wooden
door, which moaned is rusty objection as the guard heaved it open.
Then, they wandered a ways along an alarmingly narrow hall. The
confinement quickened the priest’s heart, and he was annoyed that
this happened every time, at this particular spot.

The stones wept inside as well as out,
though the walls were a good twelve feet thick. It was cold and
gloomy, and D’ata’s mood paled even more.

Lighting a second oilcloth, the guard
shoved it at the priest. He unlocked a door and nodded towards what
appeared to be a dark, bottomless hole.

Holding the torch with both hands,
like a crucifix, D’ata allowed his eyes to adjust to the black maw
before him. The circling steps were sadly familiar to him as they
fell away into apparent nothingness. He inhaled deeply, as though
to venture further would command that he step beneath the surface
of humanity to the abyss of heartlessness.

The guard turned, his oily breath
beckoning for the liquor which would lure him back to sleep. “He’s
a wretched one Father, and you shouldn’t be wasting your time on
him. He’ll be Satan’s whore by tomorrow night, and God be rid of
him.” He laughed heartily, handed D’ata a spare dungeon key and
slammed the door, locking it behind him.

D’ata stood in merciless silence, glad
to be rid of the man but dreading the cold, pitiless beyond.
Clearing his throat, the noise echoed loudly, uninviting to his
ears. He was aware that his own breathing had deepened and become
faster, and he held his breath, forcing himself to exhale slowly.
This was not the first time he’d passed this way. Why did it seem
so foreboding tonight?

Reaching the oilcloth upward, he lit
the first of many lamps to guide his way down the long flight of
stone steps, which seemed to sink away forever. He squinted as he
pushed the heavy hood from his head, and the golden light from the
fire washed warmly across his face.

Giotto, the painter, would have cried
to see him.

D’ata refused to believe the rumors
he’d heard whispered, that his was a tormented and lovely face.
They said it carried the weight of tragedy—a beautiful, amber face
with heartbreaking eyes that seemed to betray his affliction. They
were framed with thick, long lashes. Even she, at one time, had
mentioned that when his mood was temperamental or impassioned, his
eyes had a habit of changing, turning from a deep chocolate brown
so that they appeared as indigo as a moonlit sea.

When he studied his face in the faded
looking glass in the monastery, he did not recognize the man who
stared back. ‘Who was this?’ he wondered, peering at the cheekbones
that rose sharply, chiseled and almost too thin. Just this morning
he’d tried hard to rid his jaw and lip of the hair that grew so
fast, but the day’s growth already cast a smoky shadow on his face.
Sometimes he wondered who he’d become, with lips that were full and
wide, curling up gently at the sides as though they held a
forbidden secret. But there were no more secrets now—were
there?

Monsignor Leopold had scolded him,
demanding he shave his locks, leaving the skullcap that marked his
diocese, but the nights were so long and cold. He was filled with
such a bitter, incurable despair that he'd allowed his hair to grow
long. It curled thick and soft around the nape of his neck and
swept across his eyes when he bowed his head, shielding him from
the prying eyes of others in the congregation. As for the
monsignor’s demands, they were the least of his concerns
anymore.

He was lovely to behold, though he’d
never fancied himself so. The older priests and the nuns mumbled
their concerns over his allure, attractive beyond the comfort and
social confines of the church, they'd been heard to say. His
appearance lent itself poorly to his calling. And, there was his
terrible history—one of intermittent acts of sordid
rebellion.

Here lay his greatest shame. His story
was well known, though seldom spoken of, and he himself tried
desperately to recall it only in his dreams. ‘Funny,’ he thought,
‘how one can drown repeatedly in one’s dreams, though.’

His eyebrows sloped gently above his
sad eyes and furrowed slightly at the task ahead of him. His hand
reached, once more, beneath the collar of his robes. Rubbing his
neck absently, he peered into the darkness which threatened and
beckoned him all at once. The beckoning was what gave him pause
just now.

Slowly, as though he didn’t trust his
own legs, he descended the steps, his heart heavy for the task that
lay ahead. He sighed again. The prisoner should be seen and, after
all, it was God’s will. No man should face death without the
opportunity to confess, to make his peace with the creator, or spit
his final insult. It just seemed to D’ata that so often these men
cared not at all for their acts, nor their fates. He frowned. Life
was piteous and unpredictable, and it wasn’t hard to imagine caring
so little that the prospect of death seemed enviable.

He made his way forward, dropping
gradually downward. The water dripped in sleepy rivulets down the
massive stone walls. D’ata had seen the lifeblood of the beheaded
drip just so, after the initial geyser following the executioner’s
blade. He wondered if the soul left in such a way, an initial rush,
then dragging behind it the final droplets of what a man truly
was.

The stone steps were enormous, a good
fourteen inches vertical, as though the castle had been built for
giants. The dungeon stairs deepened and rats scurried away from the
unwelcome light as he lit the lamps, one by one. The steps seemed
to go on forever, and D’ata was overcome with the sensation of
descending into the bowels of the earth, the way station for
travelers on their way to hell.

“
Damn these thoughts. For
hell’s sake, give the poor bastard a chance,” he said aloud and
then swore softly again at his blasphemy. “Forgive me father, for I
have sinned—again.”

D’ata’s unorthodox lack of conformity,
and his mouth, had him in trouble more than seldom with the church.
In the past, D’ata had difficulty purifying his mind, and his words
truthfully followed his thoughts. He often struggled with
composure, for he was honest, speaking as he felt. It made for
uncomfortable moments, but most of these seemed so long ago. Now,
he remained mostly silent, and when he did have to speak, even at
confession, he tempered what he said and how he said it.

Many hours he'd knelt on the stones,
asking forgiveness for his transgressions, for he truly wished to
be a holy representative of the Father above. More importantly, he
wished to forget what had happened, more than anything...to forget.
He would stay on his knees for eternity, if God would take away the
pain.

All the same, his knees and his heart
had become callused with the time he'd spent in redemption for his
sins, during his private search for peace. His past, however, was
another story for there were no calluses on his memories. They
could haunt him every day anew, fresh as a thousand sliver cuts,
and he flushed visibly as his mind tricked him, inviting those
unwelcome thoughts once more.

“
No,” he whispered and
forced himself to concentrate on the steps, counting them as down,
down he went, further into the belly of the beast.

Finally, the steps ended and he
halted, breathing hard, not from exertion but from the anxiety that
wrapped thickly around him like the damnable robes. His spit was
hard to swallow and he had the sensation of being trapped, as
though he was as much a prisoner as the creatures held
here.

A cold sweat broke, damp and
unwelcome, beneath his robes. His thoughts turned to his warm
quarters behind the church, where he could shed the heavy woolen
clothes and slip beneath his linens and feather blanket. There he
could sip hot brandy and read his books, eventually drifting off to
sleep. Only then might he remember when he'd been happy, and maybe
a compassionate God would not disturb him.

Sometimes, it occurred to him that God
was his torturer. God held him in his outstretched hand and dropped
him, only to have him fall short of death. Horrid cutting bands,
treacherous cords about his heart; these were what saved him. Yet,
God would be his relief, his salvation—was it not so?

He 'd been given his chance to make
right with God and repent his past, to repair his heart and find
peace. That was how it was supposed to happen. Wasn’t
it?