Review
Army - The Soldiers' Newspaper (Australia)
The Good Book Guide
Sam North, Hackwriters.com, September 2005
Book Description
STARBURST
Jake Williams, DREAMWATCH
Henry Sutton, MIRROR
SUNDAY SPORT
Jake Williams, DREAMWATCH
Product Description
About the Author
Excerpted from Romanitas by Sophia McDougall. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sulien had lived five days longer as a result of the deaths of Marcus’ parents, but the morning after their funeral the guards led him out of his cell in the prison ship on the Thames estuary, and put him on the low-slung army boat bound for London.
They would already know his height and the span of his arms; they would have adjusted the settings accordingly. They would fix his arms and legs in place with leather straps and tighten them until the backs of his wrists were flat on the metal and his feet pressed hard against each other. Then they would turn a switch on the side of the cross, and three spikes would leap upright as surely as three keys entering three locks, undoing the knots of veins, puncturing the thick nerve that carried the precious feeling in his fingers, splaying the bones of his feet, violating the darkness of the flesh and finding the light again beyond the soft, vulnerable skin. Then a hydraulic pump would slowly raise the steel cross up to face the river, tipping him gently forwards so that his weight was slung between his pierced wrists, tugging the bones of his arms from their sockets, trapping the breath in his lungs. He might hang there, fighting the cross for days; watching the barges going back and forth on the Thames, carrying coal and sugar and wine.
Sulien knew a lot about the body, and he could imagine intensely and accurately what was going to happen to him. He even thought that if he shut his eyes and concentrated on his own innocent nerves, he could imagine the pain. And yet he could not believe in it; it was impossible that sitting there, with all his flesh knowing it had decades ahead of it, he should really be dying more certainly than of any illness. His body was so convinced it could not happen that he was not even as afraid as he should be. He felt he could hardly move or think, and not really for fear but because he was so hypnotised by the certainty that this wasn’t true, that there was more before him than hours of torture and then nothing.
Every half hour one of the officers would open the little hatch in the door and look in to make sure he had not found the one escape from the steel cross, the way through the wall of his own muscle and skin. Every time this happened it reminded Sulien that he really ought to have a go at killing himself. But he could not believe in that either – it was just not the sort of thing he would ever do. He got up and turned in a pointless little half-circle – trying to work himself up to it, or trying to persuade the walls around him of the laughable implausibility of his being about to die. "Come on. Do it," he said sternly, aloud. He sat down again and looked speculatively at his wrists. At once he shuddered and clenched his right hand protectively around his left wrist, clutching so hard that his fingers could just feel the groove between the two thin bones. Gathering himself again he began to pull clumsily at the hem of his shirt, pretending that he would tear off a strip and!
twist it into a noose, knowing that he wouldn’t. He could not think what to fix it to in any case; but people did kill themselves, even on suicide watch, so it must be possible. It was just somehow not possible for him.
The hatch opened again – how could that have been half an hour? It had scarcely felt like time enough to cross the cell. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
