Free The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories by Ian Watson, Ian Whates Page B

looked on fondly, but the way they killed Christos was atrocious. Believe me, Absalom, an arrow in the lungs is a luxurious hot bath next to crucifixion.
     
    That was what the Romans did to Him . It was reserved for those they despised the most. It’s the worst possible way I’ve ever come across for a man to die. No Roman noble or citizen could be crucified because it was considered a form of death unfair for free men. It was for slaves, thieves, bandits and - of course - for those who rebelled against Rome.
     
    It all started with a thrashing. The soldiers trussed you up and flogged you. They used a long whip with pieces of bone or metal studded in the end. The thong wrapped itself right around the body, tearing off flesh as it went. After three times thirteen lashes - sometimes more - there was more skin hanging off your back and chest than was left hanging on.
     
    Having softened you up like this, they made you lift a heavy wooden beam and stagger off to the place of execution. In Jerusalem at this time, it was a small hill outside the city walls called Golgotha, the Place of Skulls.
     
    Here there was a vertical wooden post six or seven feet high. When you got there, you were invited to drop the beam you’d been carrying. Then the soldiers knocked you over and lay the back of your neck in the middle of the beam. Then they stretched out one of your arms along the beam. A couple of the men held the arm down while another one took one of those big, long four-sided nails and hammered it through your wrist into the wood below.
     
    Having nails through the wrist is extremely painful. Believe me, I know.
     
    After they’d done this with the other arm, the whole execution squad lent a hand to lift up the crossbeam with you hanging from it, yelling your lungs out in agony, or maybe just biting your tongue, determined not to give those filthy bastards any pleasure by letting on you were suffering.
     
    But then you found it very difficult not to yell out when they actually lifted you off the ground.
     
    There was a hole in the middle of the beam roughly under your head. This they slotted into the vertical piece already wedged in the ground.
     
    Now they bent your knees upward until the sole of one foot was pressed flat against the vertical piece. Well fuck my old sandals if they didn’t then produce another one of those big nails.
     
    A nail through the foot is more - much more - painful than a nail through the wrist. They hammered it through one foot, and when the point came through the sole of that foot, they hammered it through the other foot and into the wood.
     
    Then they would leave you alone. Some would watch, maybe they would take bets with one another on how long you’d live. After a while, it got boring, and they’d post a guard and go off to get drunk or screw a hog or whatever it was that legionaries did in their time off.
     
    About now, you’d wish that you were back in the barracks being flogged. If, by any strange mischance, you had not gone out of your mind, you might have time to wish they had flogged you harder because the flogging weakened you. And the weaker you were, the sooner you died. And death was the only thing you desired. Death was the only thing left.
     
    You didn’t bleed much, but the pain was indescribable. The weight of your body hanging from your wrists pulled your chest upwards as though you’d taken the biggest, deepest breath ever. But you couldn’t breathe out. To breathe out, you’d have to push upwards with your legs. Pushing up with your legs was indescribably painful because of that bloody nail running through your feet.
     
    At the same time, there was even more pain coming from cramps in your hands, along your arms and shoulders and chest.
     
    You were in all this pain, and you could hardly breathe. If you were really lucky, you’d bleed, or more likely suffocate, to death in perhaps five hours. If you weren’t lucky, it could take days.
     
    And those clever,