Lamia by Juliandes Page B

as if it had been gnawed by rats.  Mateo explained that he would get another beating after about an hour and then a third one sometime later still, after which he should be dead.  I told him that he didn’t have to trouble himself because I had other plans for him.  After I explained my plans, Mateo laughed and nodded his approval.
    Later that day I arrived at a village high in the mountains with Alejo and three other mountain-men.  Almero was covered over in the back, every bump in the road bring more pain to his injured body.   The mountain-men assembled the villagers in the main square, close to a burnt-out house.  As soon as we led him out, Almero once again panicked as he recognised the family whose parents he had locked in the burning house.  I told them that he was a present from the Lamia and that they may despatch him in any way they chose.
    The villagers led him away and we distributed p acks of food we had brought as gifts.  They were very grateful and we were all invited to a feast held in my honour.  There was meat roasted over a big fire and we had wine and beer .   The evening brought with it dancing and music from a guitar and a home-made flute-like ins trument.  M erriment went on well into the night and I had almost forgotten why we were there.  Then they dragged the semi-conscious body of Almero to the feast.  Judging by his swollen genitals, he hadn’t been enjoying the evening, and his day wasn’t about to get any better.  They bound his hands behind his back and tied his feet to a rope that was fed over a high branch of a tree.  Then they hoisted him a few feet off the ground and swung him, pendulum-fashion, over the fire.  Every time the pendulum slowed down he screamed at the villagers, begging them to push him.  The men and women were by now quite drunk and sometimes they’d push him but sometimes they’d slow him down.  By the time we turned in for the night, there were two women lef t watching the slowing pendulum. Almero’s face and upper body were burnt black and crusty and his shrill screams were getting weaker and less frequent.  All in all it was a very successful trip. ”
    I was now feeling very nauseou s and I think Lamia was beginning to enjoy shocking me.  I clicked on my wind-up torch for a few moments, to bring a sense of normality to our surroundings.   It brought me back to where I was, rather than beside a twitching body being seared over a fire in a distant mountain village.
    “Lamia, you’ve watched a man being tortured to death!  How can you possibly describe the trip with such a bland word like successful?”
    Again she looked very confused.  She thought for a moment in case there was a buried question she had not noticed.
    “Almero was dead which left the way open for Mateo to take over his end of the market.  That was the main objective, but it also meant that word of the Lamia would now spread over that side of the mountain as well.”
    “But they saw you as a real person who ate and drank with them.  Surely this would have kill ed the legend.”
    “Legends are funny things.  By the time that story had reached ten villages I would have been seen flying in carrying Almero under one arm and a ready-cooked hog under the other.  Once a legend is resurrected, conditions that were attached to the old legend are also assumed to be true .  I just needed to put in an appearance from time to time.  This trip showed them the good and the bad.  The farmers were rewarded and the man who brought terror to their village was punished.  So there you are, th e true balance: good and evil.”
    I think it was because I remembered what Maria was like, that it shocked me so much to see how Lamia had handled murder in such a matter-of-fact way.  When she was describing the theory behind the things she had done, she seemed like a normal person, but when she described the torture and murder of Almero, she spoke as the Lamia.  I took into account all that she