But once
the process had begun my brain would not abandon and I found myself,
with compulsive precision, counting off the seconds and the minutes in
each cycle: stretch upward, release the pressure on the arms; the
beginning of pain in calves and arches and toes; the creeping of pain up
ribs and loins and shoulders; the sudden jarring drop on the arms again.
My throat was intolerably dry. Under other circumstances I might have
estimated the time by the growth of hunger and thirst, but the rough
treatment I had received made this impossible. There were other,
unmentionable, humiliating pains.
After a time, to bolster my flagging courage, I found myself thinking of
all the ways it might have been worse. I had heard of a _shegrin_
exposed to the bite of poisonous--not fatal, but painfully
poisonous--insects, and to the worrying of the small gnawing rodents
which can be trained to bite and tear. Or I might have been branded....
I banished the memory with the powerful exorcism; the man in Daillon
whose anticipation, alone, of a torture which never came, had broken his
mind.
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