Her mouth was stretched wide by the ball gag, her facial features distorted to a
grotesque mask of pain, one that suited admirably her situation. She was naked and
spread-eagled, upright but held back against the heavy timbers of the wooden cross,
crucified and yet that suffering wasn’t enough – her true suffering was only about to
begin.
      In the cold and musty smelling basement the lighting was as low the ceilings and
the flickering hue on the old stone walls danced with reflected light from the burring
torches and braziers. The temperature was chill but still a coating of perspiration
covered her skin, on her breasts and stomach, the fronts of her thighs and in the creases
of her crotch, her pussy slit and the cleft of her backside. The trembling girl could
smell the awful odour of her own armpits and if not for the gag keeping her jaws apart,
she felt sure her teeth would be chattering. It wasn’t the cold for the sinister hot coals
of the braziers burned brightly and evenly, radiating heat throughout the low basement
area. It was fear, her utter terror at being imprisoned so and – how she had come to be
here? She did not know. Her mind was a blank from the moment she had gone to the car park
to put her shopping in the boot. It was all so hazy and yet, now, so very real and
horrifying. Her head throbbed from the drug, it must have been a drug that knocked her
out, for she could recall no violence being used nor of feeling anything but an
overwhelming tiredness.
      Jenny tried to hold back, tensing her muscles to check the flow, her bladder had
been aching relentlessly during the long hours she had been awake since coming round from
the drug-induced haze. Her wrists and arms ached, pulled out to the sides and up above her
shoulders the blood had long since flowed back and her limbs were numbed and cold. Even
the raw pain of the straps binding them back to the wooden frame had subsided as had the
similar chaffing pain around her ankles. She felt so exposed and vulnerable; it was
humiliating and shaming to have her legs pulled wide and her sex displayed. Even though
there was no-one to see her, someone must have brought her here and bound her so. At that
thought she began to sob again, as she had done many times in the horrible stillness of
the dungeon rooms. Tears welled up again in her reddened eyes and rolled down her cheeks
to drip from her chin onto her naked breasts, her head felt cold, her hair gone, shaved
away to remove her crowning glory and – to ruin the looks that she so treasured and had
always been at pains to maintain. It was at that thought that she broke down completely,
her stomach and belly undulating and her shoulders shaking with heartfelt and heaving sobs
of the deepest misery and fear she had ever known.
      
***
      
      “You obviously dislike our crusade,” the woman snapped haughtily and looked around
her fellow campaigners for morale support. She was losing the argument and didn’t like it;
the tall stranger was defeating her practised rhetoric with every sentence she uttered.
      They were on the street corner, amid the crowed throng of Saturday shoppers, the
corner of that street completely taken over by the campaigners. Posters were pasted to the
brick walls of the sides of the shop, standing bill-boards carried similar posters and all
of the twenty or so campaigners sported blue rosettes attached to their lapels. The
enthusiastic women stopped and pestered passers-by that mostly hung their heads and tried
to dodge the women’s libbers, snatching their pink-coloured leaflets in an effort to
appease and later probably to bin them in the nearest waste basket.
      “Indeed I do,” the tall man responded firmly. “I have no objection to women
achieving in life but do you ever see men making a fuss about it or causing such a
nuisance as you are here today? You block the pavement to the passage of the shoppers,
forcing women and children into the road to pass by and – all in the name of Women’s
liberation.”
      “You are a male chauvinist,” she tried weakly in an attempt to throw the
disadvantage back on him.
      “If you recall,” the hook-nosed man snapped back icily, his pale blue eyes boring
into hers with a sinister evil simmering within them, “You approached me as I was passing.
Trying to gain my support for your silly delusion that women could ever equal men.”
      “And they can,” the woman blurted back at him venomously.
      “How?” He challenged. “Tell me one way in which a woman can better a man.”
      The woman hesitated and stumbled her words at first then, paused and a triumphant
grin spread across her face. “We recently had a woman prime minister.” 
      “So? We have had countless male prime ministers. What is so great about just one
woman in a few hundred years gaining the position?”
      The deflation she felt showed clearly in her expression, her face dropped and she
flushed red. Before she could think of a reply the tall stranger asked. “Have you ever
heard of the Faith?”
      “Religion you mean? Ah, now! Women priests…”
      The man shook his head and spoke loudly and rapidly over her, ignoring her and
regaining the advantage over her.
      “I mean the keepers of the faith, the off-shoot sect of the Knights Templar.”
      “Crusaders weren’t they?”
      The man nodded.
      “Indeed they were, but they were keepers of more than the church’s faith. The sect
was totally male orientated and kept women firmly in their place…”
      “How dare you!” the woman hissed indignantly, hurt and shock showing in her
expression.
      The stranger, now warming to the provocation he was offering went for the throat.
“Women think they hold the whip-hand by offering or withholding sexual favours from men…”
      The delighted woman seized on the opening given her.
      “And of course they can and do. Men will do anything when presented with a choice
of having sex or going without.”
      The stranger, making ready to leave and to break away from what had now become a
boring exchange for the most part, gave his parting shot. “And on that subject, without
men women could only do as you should… Go and fuck themselves.”
      He paused a moment to savour the horrified look on the woman’s face and then walked
away laughing loudly, his mirth still audible above the street noise and from far down the
road as he went.