It was a long, wretched and tedious job. Originally the idea was to hang them in a civilized fashion, but it didn't take long for Major Nennius, officer in charge, to realize that that wasn't going to work. There were no trees sturdy enough to serve as makeshift gallows, and he was only able to scrounge up enough four-inch-square-section long timbers to build two sets of scaffolds. Even hurrying things along at maximum speed, he could only turn off two men every fifteen minutes; eight an hour, and he had sixty-seven to deal with, or sixty-eight if the Ducas was going to join them (apparently that hadn't been decided yet). In addition to which, the rain had soaked into the ropes, which meant the knots didn't slide properly. Someone suggested waxing them with beeswax, a smart-sounding idea that turned out to be useless in practice. Two hours into the job, after five of the first eight executions had gone unpleasantly wrong, Nennius decided that hanging was a refinement he couldn't afford. They were already working by torchlight, and his men had spent the day working on the carts; they were tired, wet, hungry and miserable, and he had the impression that their patience wasn't unlimited.
Unwilling to take the decision himself, he balloted his junior officers. Three of them were ardently in favor of beheading and argued their case with a fervor he found more than a little disturbing. The other four voted for strangling. Hooray, Nennius told himself, for democracy.
Once the decision had been taken, however, it turned out that nobody could be found with a good working knowledge of practical strangulation. It was simple, someone said, you just put a bit of rope round a chap's neck and pull it tight until-well, until it's all over. Nennius, however, wasn't convinced. He'd never seen a man strangled to death but he had an idea that there was rather more to it than that. Someone suggested having a prisoner in and doing a trial run. Nennius shuddered and sent out for chopping blocks and axes.
Not, he had to concede, that he'd ever seen a man decapitated in cold blood before, either. But he felt rather more confident about it than about strangling. Provided they could find a way to make the prisoner keep still, how hard could it be? A bit like chopping through tree-roots, he told himself. He gave orders for the axes to be carefully sharpened.
Perhaps it was because it was late and wet and dark; it didn't go well. The first prisoner presented himself with admirable resignation, as if he could sense that everybody was fairly close to the end of their rope, and he didn't want to make things any more fraught than they already were. But the headsman muffed the stroke, cutting into the poor man's shoulder blade instead of his neck. The prisoner jumped in the air and squirmed about uncontrollably-not his fault, Nennius had to concede, it was pure instinct and muscle spasm-and finally had to be put out of his misery with spear-thrusts and a heavy rock to the back of the head. The spectacle had a very bad effect on the rest of the prisoners, who turned uncooperative; the next victim needed four men to hold him down, and the headsman refused to swing for fear of hitting one of the helpers. Further delay, while some men botched up a sort of a crush-a heavy oak beam with a strong leather strap to secure the head, and a thick, wide plank to lay over the body, on which three men could sit. The arrangement worked, more or less, although the headsman's nerves were shot and he needed three cuts to clear his third victim, who yelled like a bullock being dehorned throughout. The next six went through all right, and then the headsman's hands slipped on the wet axe-handle, so that the blade glanced off the back of the victim's skull and sank two inches into the headsman's left foot.
After that, nobody seemed to want the job, until a smarmy young ensign who Nennius particularly disliked volunteered and, in default of other applicants, was appointed. He'd been one of the fervent pro-decapitators in the debate earlier, and he went at it with three parts enthusiasm to one part skill. It'd have been all right if he'd been a big, brawny man with plenty of upper body strength; instead, he was short and scrawny, too weak to control his swing, and he was quickly demoted on appeal from the helpers, who feared for their lives. At this point it dawned on Nennius that if he wanted to have any credibility left come morning, he was going to have to do the filthy job himself.
It wasn't like chopping tree-roots, or splitting logs. It wasn't like anything else he'd ever done before. It was exhausting, difficult, disgusting and very, very precise. But if you concentrated furiously all the time and held the axe at just the right angle and hit very hard indeed, you could sort of chip the head off the neck with one cut; whereupon it slid through the restraining strap and flipped up in the air, while the trunk jerked and spasmed, upsetting the men perched grimly on the board into the sticky red mud. An eighth of an inch either way and you'd screwed it, and that meant fifteen seconds or so of frantic hacking, which more often than not broke the neck rather than cutting it. All in all, Nennius decided, this wasn't what he'd joined the service for. In fact, it was a thoroughly unsatisfactory way of doing things, and there was still a very long way to go.
Midnight came and went. There were complaints from the rest of the camp, particularly from civilians, about the noise, which was disturbing people's sleep. There was also a message from Duke Valens, reprieving Miel Ducas, who shouldn't have been included in the general warrant in the first place.
It was understandable, perhaps, that nobody told Miel Ducas that he'd been spared; the execution party had plenty of other things to do, and it was easy for details to get overlooked. Accordingly, Miel spent the night huddled in a corner of the biscuit-barrel stockade. He'd wormed himself against the barrels as if he was trying to squeeze himself through the tiny crack that separated them, and if anybody came within two feet of him he lashed out with his hands and feet.
In spite of everything, there was still a part of his mind that was perfectly, cruelly clear; and it very much wanted to know where the sudden panic, the overpowering fear of death, had come from. He wasn't sure. The best explanation he could come up with was that he was well aware that he'd been included in the warrant by mistake-kill the prisoners, they'd said, meaning the captured scavengers; but the sergeant in charge of the guard had assumed the order referred to everybody currently under restraint. Miel had tried to explain; first quietly and reasonably, then at the top of his voice, so everybody in the camp could hear him. While he was yelling and screaming, he was bitterly ashamed of himself, and he knew perfectly well, deep inside his mind's sound core, that he was only objecting because it was a mistake, because it was unfair. Childish reasoning, giving rise to childish behavior; the Ducas doesn't throw tantrums, particularly in the hearing of seventy-odd poor unfortunates who are doing their best to compose themselves as they wait for the end. Lack of consideration for others had always been the greatest sin, after disloyalty. Every time he paused for breath, he could hear them muttering and swearing at him telling him to shut up, put a sock in it, get a grip. He realized that at the end he'd lost everything, and he tried to use that to pull himself together. But each time he heard the axe fall-the clean shearing hiss, the soft thump followed by a shriek that marked a botched cut, the deep bite of the edge going through into the oak of the block-the panic surged up and spurted into his brain, overruling all his objections and setting him off again, like a baby woken up in the night.
Each time the guards came and grabbed someone, he thought, I wish they'd take me, and then it'd be over with; then, as the hurdles that served the pen as a makeshift gate were slammed and chained, he snuggled harder still against the barrels, shivering like a man with a high fever, desperate with relief because they'd taken someone else, not him. Then the pause; then the axe-fall, and off he'd go again, explaining in a yell that slurred the words together about the mistake in the warrant; then the hurdle-chain would rattle and he'd think, They'll take me next, just to stop me making this horrible disgusting noise; and so back to the beginning, top dead center of the flywheel, and the wish that they'd take him next.