I Shackled the Prisoner the Governor Forgot

The wine is gone. I look at the pouch hanging from my belt; I still have a few coins left. I could ask for another jug. I know I shouldn’t. I greet the innkeeper and leave the tavern, dodging drunks and cutpurses.

There are women in here, half a dozen of them, all with plunging necklines and bare shoulders. They give any man who walks by a smile. To everyone but me. They’re afraid of me. I don’t care. Smiles are given away; everything else is sold in the upstairs rooms.

I walk two hundred steps along the unpaved street. At the end rises my house, my workplace, the place everyone fears: one of the towers of the wall, the tallest one, four stories of dark stone. They call it the Blind Tower, because its cellars have not a single window.

I am the jailer. I was a soldier, a sergeant, decorated. I was almost appointed an officer the day a spear went through my leg while I was saving a captain from a good family. Since then I’ve limped. The governor granted me this job almost twenty years ago, and here I still am.

The tower has three uses. On the floor where I live, I receive the prisoners brought to me by the guard. On the cell floor, I lock up petty criminals: bread thieves, drunks, women who make a scene. And downstairs, in the two cellars, are the dungeons. Damp, blind, full of rotten air. In the second cellar, at the center, there is a well. The priest does not bury the condemned in consecrated ground, so I throw them in there. That well is now a storehouse of bones.

***

When I get back to my dwelling, the sun is high. I don’t have to cook: the city pays a tavern keeper from a neighboring district to feed its guards, and that includes me. She always comes in person. I’m always the last stop on her route.

—Hello, Brígida —I say when I hear her steps on the wooden stairs.

—Hello! —she answers, already smiling.

Brígida is a strong woman, generously built, five years younger than I am. She uncovers the clay pot and the smell of beans with bacon fills the room. She sits at my table, as always. She has brought wine, as always.

We eat and drink. She loosens the laces of her bodice and toys with a lock of her black hair. When she drains the last swallow, she parts her legs, closes her eyes, and lets her breasts spill over the fabric. No more is needed.

I hold her and kiss her. My tongue enters her mouth with the sour taste of wine. We undress like two animals and fall onto the pile of straw covered by the blanket that serves as my bed. I kiss her neck, her breasts, I go down between her thighs. I hear her gasping, holding back a cry.

She turns over and offers me her ass. I enter her slowly, then harder, faster, until heat floods through me and I spill inside her. Then I stroke her for a long while, in silence. I like watching her breathe naked. She’s no longer young or beautiful, but when she’s near I want nothing else in the world.

I know what people in the neighborhood say about her: that she sleeps with the young travelers who pass through her inn. I don’t judge her. I only want her to keep coming.

***

It was already night and the tower door was closed when they knocked. The guard had brought a young woman, dressed as a peasant, her face covered in bruises and her hands bound.

—What has she done? —I asked.

—She stole a jewel from the Virgin. Straight to the deepest dungeon.

—What?

—What you heard. The governor was at mass, he judged her right there. He ordered her hanged from the tree in the square and changed his mind when the executioner was already knotting the rope. His exact words were “straight to the deepest dungeon.” And he added: “for life.”

Dungeons are always for life. I took the woman by the arm and brought her into the tower. I shut the door. Those brutes no longer ruled; now I ruled.

In the torchlight I saw a small woman with tanned skin and black hair, curly and wild around her face. The green dress was torn in several places, no doubt from the soldiers’ handling. I couldn’t help looking at her breasts, round and firm. Like Brígida’s when she was fifteen years younger.

I sat her on the wooden bench. I took a sack and made a hole in the bottom and two in the corners with my dagger.

—This is going to be your dress —I said—. I’m going to cut your bonds.

I saw relief on her face as she rubbed her wrists. Then I frightened her again.

—Take off all your clothes and sandals and put on the sack. You can do it behind that wardrobe.

She didn’t answer. Just fear. But she obeyed.

She came back barefoot, wearing the sack, which barely covered her body. I was waiting by the fire with a pair of small bronze shackles, covered in green patina. They were the only ones that size; someone had forged them, long ago, for a lady’s ankles. When she saw them dangling from my hand, she was terrified.

—Here, on your knees.

She obeyed without protest. I placed the metal rings around her ankles and fastened them with a hemp cord. I heated a lead rivet almost to melting.

—If you don’t want to burn yourself, don’t move.

I set the rivet in the clasp and struck it with the hammer. One single, dry blow. The hot metal deformed like butter. I cooled it with water, which hissed into steam. She trembled from head to foot, but she didn’t move. I repeated the operation on the other ankle. This time the steam reached her face and she burst into tears.

—I didn’t do it —she kept saying—. I didn’t do it.

For some reason I let her cry beside the fire. Then I led her down the stairs, to the second cellar. “The deepest dungeon,” they had said. I sat her beside a pillar, under one of the tiny skylights, and hooked her shackles to a seven-foot chain set into the stone. That would be her freedom from then on.

—The torch will last an hour. Eat and drink if you want to live —I left her bread, water, and a blanket—. Tomorrow I’ll come back with more.

She didn’t open her mouth. She only stared at the iron on her ankles with sad eyes.

***

The next morning I went down with a bowl of hot food. Before I got there, I heard a soft voice. I peered through the skylight unseen: she was seated on the straw, holding a skull in her hand, talking to it. She changed her voice to answer herself, like two young girls flirting at a village fair. She had stretched the chain all the way to the well and pulled the skull out. First night and she already seemed mad.

When she saw me, she hid the skull under the blanket. I held out the bowl. I sat down to wait, not knowing why; perhaps she needed to see someone, even if it was me. When she finished, she began talking to herself.

—My name is Leonor, daughter of Elvira and Rodrigo, free peasants. Yesterday was market day and procession day. They took the Virgin through the square and, when she passed by me, I saw on the ground a gold necklace with a red stone, one of her jewels. I bent down and picked it up. I was going to give it back, I swear. Then a friar began shouting and pointing at me: thief, sacrilegious woman. The guards seized me, one of them shoved his hand into my neckline and took out the jewel.

She stopped, swallowed, and went on.

—They took me before the governor. I swore I was going to return it. He didn’t believe me. While the procession was leaving, two soldiers locked me in a room in the sacristy, bent me over a stone table, and took turns with me. That night I lost my virginity without anyone asking me. Then they dragged me to the tree. The executioner already had the noose open above my head when the governor shouted “stop,” said he didn’t want to spoil the feast, and ordered them to bring me here. For life.

She rested her head on the pillar. I sat beside her and let her lean against me. Her body was cold. I held her in silence until she fell asleep. I went up the stairs without knowing what to think. Did she really mean to return the jewel? Why does the governor have absolute power over life and death? For the first time in twenty years, I doubted the justice I served.

***

That afternoon I took her dinner down. Brígida had sent plenty of food, as if to make up for not coming in person. When I reached Leonor, she pulled the blanket off herself. She was naked. She smiled at me and began to eat.

—Why are you naked? —I asked.

—The sack itches and doesn’t keep me warm. Down here I have no one to be ashamed of. —She looked at me—. Only you.

I didn’t dislike looking at her: a young body, fresh, curvy. I thought about doing what the soldiers had done. Who’s going to stop me? Who would care? I stopped myself. Something inside me.

When she finished, she lifted the blanket on one side and invited me to lie down with her. I accepted, uncertain. I felt her skin, now warm and soft. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. She stayed wrapped around me, clinging to me, her eyes closed.

Almost an hour passed. I couldn’t sleep. Then she shifted, pressed her ass against my groin, and began to rub herself slowly, back and forth.

—Take me —she said in an oddly firm voice—. I know you want to.

—Why? —Wasn’t she a decent girl? Did she lie to me? She doesn’t look like a virgin recently forced.

—Down here I can only be with you or talk to the skulls. I prefer you, even if you’re older. You’ve treated me better than the soldiers. And just because I was a virgin until the day before yesterday doesn’t mean I hadn’t fooled around with the village boys.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I stroked her nipples, bit her back, searched between her legs with my fingers. She was soaked. I entered her carefully, then harder, faster, until I let go without control. We collapsed on the straw, her chained ankles brushing against mine.

***

A week passed. Every night I went down to feed Leonor and stayed with her, sometimes for a while, sometimes until dawn. Brígida kept sending the food with other girls who entered the tower looking terrified and left running. I started hearing that at her inn there was a rich traveler courting her and running the business. She lives in the world; I live in the tower. Maybe she’ll come back, maybe she won’t. I no longer cared so much.

One afternoon the guard brought up one of the whores from Beltrán’s tavern in custody. Constanza, her name was. She had drunk too much and caused a scene. I bound her and locked her in the upstairs cell to await sentencing. When I went up with her food and to tell her the month-long term she’d been handed, I found her lying there, cold, without a pulse. She had died.

I carried her body on my shoulder like a sack and threw it into the well of bones. Then I went to Leonor. Her face was twisted with terror.

—She was imprisoned. They’ve just sentenced her to a month. She was found dead in her cell —I explained, and took a chisel and hammer out of the sack.

—What are you doing? —she asked as she watched me break the rivet of one of her shackles.

—That woman is your height and build. She’s older, but in a month no one will be able to tell.

—I don’t understand…

—Leonor died today in the dungeon. You, from now on, are Constanza. I’ve washed her clothes and I’ll give them to you. You’ll spend a month in the upstairs cell and in thirty days I’ll set you free. Don’t look for your parents or your friends. Leave the city. Go into service in a house or an inn, wherever you can. And if not, beg or sell your body. Anything will be better than rotting here, buried alive.

I broke the second shackle. For the first time in twenty years, the jailer of the Blind Tower was opening a chain to give someone back their life instead of taking it away.

***

Completely fictional story, set in fictional places, with fictional characters and adults of legal age.