THE PYRE | ONC2021

Ⅰ

IT STARTED WHEN the woman on the pyre started to laugh instead of burning.

Anna Bein was a midwife. She had apparently delivered hundreds of babes in her career of more than two decades, says the apothecary's wife. Quite skilled. She was a dumpy, melty sort of woman—her soft, round face would contort into a wide smile when she would come in to buy some bread, the baker says. Big smiles for small occasions. Everyone knew her to be an amicable, nice, God-fearing woman; that is, until she was accused of witch-craft.

Lady Ingrid pitied her to some extent.

Some extent. 

Not completely. 

She was, after all, the one spearheading the witch-hunt for Madam Anna Bein. She couldn't be heard sympathizing with the enemy. So she stayed quiet, watching silently, stone-faced as the screaming woman was dragged out in the middle of the night, wrenched from her husband who was knocked out by one of the villagers—one hit to the back of his head with a club—and then she was stripped in the square till one incriminating witch's mark was found on the inside of her arm. A crescent moon shape, brown against her cream skin.

It could have been just a birthmark, thought Ingrid. Or a freckle.

But she couldn't say it out loud. She was already in a precarious position. 

People didn't tend to trust a woman with a sword. They'd be quick to call her a witch. Hell, if they'd go after Anna Bein of all people, after one measly little accusation from the seamstress—Ingrid recalled the horrid spat they'd had in the market the other day over a piece of cloth—Anna Bein, who helped half the village's women give birth, Anna Bein who was known to be gentle, upright, a shining model of femininity; then what was Ingrid?

A bastard daughter who sneaked her way into becoming a squire, then a sellsword?

Or a witch?

Ingrid had shivered as she imagined the things they would say as they would justify her status as a witch when she saw the allegations being screeched at Madam Bein. 

No woman could ever hold a sword like she does. It must be the devil's work.

Then a farmer had turned to her, and whispered angrily, "I can understand why you are shivering, milady, these witches make everyone feel that way. It's the power of the devil—the devil, I say—whom they have slept with."

She had just nodded in complicity, and gestured for the wood to be assembled.

The pyre was not an imposing structure if you would not consider the people who had succumbed to the public hysteria and strapped men, women and children, bound by rope and bone and lit aflame, mimicking the heat in hell that the people were sure that these witches would face.

It was purifying, according to the villagers. The witches were impurities that needed to be removed from the earth.

Madam Bein was strapped onto the pyre. She did not stop screaming and kicking. One of the farmers got hit in the face by her shoe—and then he slapped her across the face. She tried biting his hand. But then she was tied down, her hands splayed and tied with the strongest rope the workmen could offer.

Then she was set on fire.

The flames rose, and they rose higher, and they lit up the sky. From the flames, embers floated to the sky, like new stars embedding them into the nightscape. The people chanted and cheered as the woman began to scream as the flames began to devour her. Her hands flinched and her mouth contorted for a few minutes and Ingrid collapsed on her chair on the platform. She could not see it anymore.

A quarter of an hour passed.

Anna Bein ceased to scream. Ingrid let out a sigh of relief, thinking that the ordeal was over. She raised her head to see Madam Bein's limp head, hung down in death-like stupor, rise.

Goosebumps rose on every part of her body, and something told Ingrid that what she was witnessing was not just a poor woman accused of witchcraft.

This wasn't Anna Bein.

The corpse—surely, it was a corpse, Anna Bein could not have been alive—raised its head. Ingrid could hear the shrinkage near the skin of the neck—she could not have been alive. Most died by that. 

And she watched in horror, as that corpse started to laugh.

It struggled against its bonds. And it laughed.

Ingrid had heard Anna Bein's laugh before. It was a pleasant, slightly funny, shriek-like  sound. 

This was not Anna Bein.

The laughter was deep, raspy, and it sounded like the very crackle and snap of the wood that burnt around it. It sounded like it came from somewhere other than the throat and tongue of the corpse. It sounded like a witch.

"How does it feel," the corpse said between hiccups of laughter, sounding like it came from everywhere at once, "To have killed another innocent?"

The crowd stayed silent, planted to their places where they stood.

Ingrid rose from her seat, her hand flying to her sword.

"This woman was an innocent. She was not a witch," The corpse's mouth was barely open, but the voice was so loud, so grating, so pervasive it could have possibly not come from it.

"She was not a witch. But we are." It smiled. 

Now it sounded like hundreds of voices, a crowd chanting. Some deep, some high, all in unison.

"We shall no longer stay silent at the death of our kin. We shall take revenge—"

The corpse cackled.

"And when you see our true power, all the troubles that these lands are seeing today will be nothing more than pleasant days—"

The people stayed silent.

"You cannot kill all the witches. We stand together, and we stand stronger than you—you who would accuse one of your own. We rise where one of us falls, ten shall rise from the pyre where one burns—"

The fire eating the wood and the clothes of Anna Bein sounded like it was laughing along with the corpse.

"The pyre cannot help you now—"

A screech, and Ingrid ran to the corpse, jumping into the pyre. She felt the flames lick her armour. 

And Lady Ingrid drew her sword, in a shred of a moment of pure, undulated fear, chopped off Madam Anna Bein's head. 

It ceased to laugh as it was lopped off, tumbling to the base of the burning wood. 

There was a sickening thud when it hit the ground, and Ingrid staggered away from the pyre.

There was a momentary beat of silence, then equally sickening cheers from the villagers.

Then there was the pyre which burned, and burned, and burned; till the only thing that was left was ashes and gasps from the villagers as they discovered, between the black soot and the ashes and embers: the completely unblemished, beheaded body of Madam Anna Bein.

:::

word count: 1136

day: 10/2/2021.