Cold stone. Metal bars. A dull, stale stirring of air, the kind of air that hadn’t been touched by sunlight in years. A damp smell in the air — a mingling of rot with an awful metallic edge of dried blood. In the distance, the tiny sound of scrabbling paws, vermin scurrying across flesh and bone and stone alike. And lower than that, so close to the edge of hearing that you’d wonder if you were imagining it, a voice crying out in pain, over and over again, unheeded and unheard.

She was awake, she knew that much. She tried so hard not to be awake — sleep was a blessing from God himself, an escape, a freedom that was no longer available to her waking body. In sleep she knew nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. Oblivion. It lured her, taunted her, evaded her at every step — thanks to her tormentors. They would not let her sleep.

And they would not let her die.

There it came, the crash of her old friend again — pain burned through the side of her face and she cried out. Or rather, her body cried out. She’d long since given up on the idea that anyone would hear her, take pity on her or spare her from this fate. But her body, dumb animal that it was, kept crying. Kept fighting. Kept her here, awake. Kept her here, alive. For another day, another day, another day. All she wanted was for every last drop of blood to abandon her body so that she could finally drop into the kind of sleep nobody would ever wake her from. But every time she thought they’d finally done it — hit too hard, cut too deep, left her too long without food or water — the stupid, wretched traitor that was her body brought her back around.

The question sounded again — a long time ago, the totally different animal she’d used to be had given the questions numbers, and the animal she was now remembered those numbers out of spite, or chance, or sheer dumb malevolence. This was the third question. It was asked, over and over again, with a downward inflection — as though they knew she wouldn’t answer, couldn’t answer, had tried over and over and over to answer until they’d broken her hands and her teeth and her spirit. Her spirit, oh yes, a thousand times over they’d broken her spirit. She’d thought that would never break, but she had been wrong about so many things. The only thing that hadn’t broken was her body’s will to live. That burned on, like a beacon of futility a hundred feet high.

The question would be asked, and then there would be pain. For a while, she had experimented with answering the question, but there didn’t seem to be an answer that resulted in less pain, only different pain. One answer brought pain to her hands, one answer brought pain to her feet, one answer brought pain to her mouth. There was no rhythm to it, no pattern — and if there was an answer that brought no pain at all, she hadn’t found it yet.

At this stage, speaking was agony enough all by itself, so she had renounced that idea. No more words to be spoken. An animal she had been, a thousand years ago, used to speak and laugh and sing. Now the implements of those fanciful hobbies were just so much wet red meat that sat in her mouth like slugs. Oozing. Always oozing that acrid tang of metal, blood running down the back of her throat and pooling in her empty stomach until it weighed heavily enough to make her vomit it back up. Healing didn’t seem to be in her repertoire of tricks any more than speaking did, these days.

The pain came again, an old enemy who was never the same. She did not allow herself to wish for death, because wishing for anything made her more aware of its absence. She may as well wish for no pain, or a soft bed, or a hearty meal — it would only cause her more pain, but this was the kind she inflicted on herself. Pain only from her tormentors that was the only principle she had left, here in this cold place that was not Hell because Hell was a place away from God and all these men spoke of was God. God’s grace. God’s light. Once upon a time, she had known what these words represented. They had been connected in her heart like lights, like beacons. They had brought her a thing called joy, which was something that the animal she used to be felt regularly.

Oh yes, God. God was here with her. She knew this as a truth, in the way that she knew her hands were bound behind her, in the way she knew that the voice in her ears belonged to the man who was hitting her, in the way she knew that she had six toes left of her original ten. These were facts, simple facts. Not good or bad. Nothing in this place could be good or bad, because if you began to think of things as good or bad then you began to suffer. Whether she was suffering was a question she chose not to ask. Asking questions, even of herself, was another thing that brought the pain too close to the surface of her consciousness to be borne — and she had to bear it. There was no choice but to bear it. It was bear it or die, and her body had already made it clear that it wasn’t going to die. Not just yet.

If she wondered anything — and she wondered with extreme caution, she wondered about things the way a man lying on a riverbank might look at the surface of the river and think that perhaps fish were beneath it, though he didn’t know for sure or care to find out. But if she wondered anything — if any fish swam by that riverbank — she wondered what God thought. What God thought, of all this. Of what was being done. Did God look upon the man before her — did God see him, striking her with the kind of precision a swordsman would envy, over and over on the same part of her jaw, so that each blow hurt more than the last, drove the bruise deeper into the bone, sent new hairline fractures splintering out from the dozen splits and breaks in the bones of her skull? Did God admire the man’s dedication to his work?

She did. She admired it. It was an awful thing, to be so adept at such obscene cruelty, and the word awful had ‘awe’ in it. She wanted to tell him, suddenly, and that took her by great surprise, because wanting anything was no longer part of the list of things she could do. But to tell required to speak, and to speak required a tongue that was a live and dancing muscle, not a wet slab of macerated meat that oozed and oozed and oozed, so instead she smiled. There were only a few ligaments left in her face, so she could only feel one side of her top lip go up, but he saw it.

He saw it, and he cursed, and what he said had a word in it that a person she used to be had known to mean warmth, and light, and home. He said the word again, louder now, and more men came. She had forgotten most of what happened next — had forgotten that the door to her cell opened, had forgotten the corridor beyond it. Most of all she had forgotten the touch of the sun on her skin and the feel of a fresh wind.

It didn’t feel right anymore. It stung her raw flesh and told her she was the wrong kind of animal now, to be in the sunlight, to be kissed by the breeze. The man said the word again and she saw a strange accumulation of another thing she had forgotten, which was called wood. In the center of the wood, a stick. In the center of the wood, now, her body. Still alive, her dumb animal body, still holding her up in the face of all this.

The man said the word again, the word that meant light and joy and happiness to a person that she would never be again, and more men held bright sticks to the piles of wood that now surrounded her. They were far back from her, which was the best place for them to be, because when the men were far back they could not strike her ruined face or twist at her broken limbs or cut off any more pieces of the body she now dwelled in unwillingly. There was no word for what she felt now, as the flames began to rise between her and the men, began to creep in toward her stake. No word for it, because she had forsaken language long ago, and a new word would have to be made to describe what it meant for the barrier of the flame to rise and cut her off from the men who had struck and hit and questioned, questioned, questioned in Italian and Church Latin.

The closest word was this one: “happy”.

She was happy, as the fire roared, and claimed her.

And to the very end, to the scorched and blackened end, to the end that crackled and screamed, Bellina’s ruined body fought with everything it had not to die.