beneath all this, is trying to single out a jewel of memory to take to her grave, something of hers and Gunter’s, like the warm night in summer they swam and made love in the Donau, skimmed by ghostly fish and overarched by fierce constellations – has never met a Pope. She’s never heard of Pope Pious XXII, who, nudged in the small and heartburning hours by yours truly, granted formal power to the Inquisition back in 1320. She’s never heard of Pope Nicholas V, who, 130 years later, extended its authority, nor of Pope Innocent (don’t you love these names? Pious? Innocent?) VIII, whose Bull, which I might as well have dictated, commanded secular authorities to co-operate fully with Inquisitors and to cede judiciary and executive powers in matters pertaining to heresy and witchcraft. Marta’s never heard of any of these good prelates, nor of Bulls (except the ones that cover cows, precariously, standing on their little back legs) nor, indeed, of theology. Marta, as a matter of fact, can’t read or write. (Neither can Gunter, for the record.) She has absolutely no idea that the coals in the brazier, the branding irons, the thumbscrews, the lances, the cat o’nine tails, the bullwhip, the hammers, the pliers, the nails, the ropes, the hot chair, the manacles, the knives, the hatchet, the skewers – she has absolutely no idea that her impending relationship with these items has been facilitated by Vatican scribes and a string of Popes, some shrewd, some spooked, all quick to catch on to the remunerative potential of witchhunting. Marta has never heard of Brothers Sprenger and Kramer, my star students among the German Dominicans, whose labour of love, the Malleus Maleficarum published eighty-one years earlier, drew a minutely detailed diagram of how to detect, interrogate and execute nubiles deemed suspect. She’s never been to a Sabbat, nor signed in blood, nor sacrificed babies, nor delivered the acolyte’s ‘infamous kiss’ (the tonguing, thank you my dear, of His Satanic Majesty’s slack and gamy butthole), nor flown on a broomstick, nor – I’m sorry to say – copulated with me or any of my hircine proxies. Truly, Marta’s venials make a paltry list: stole an orange; wished Frau Grippel would get a fever; called Helga a farting sow; sucked Gunter’s cock (and a formidable bratwurst it is, I can tell you); admired the beauty of my arms in the Donau; thought I’m the prettiest girl in Uffenstadt.
No, Marta’s been a good girl. God really should be taking better care of her. But, as is the way of it with Creators who move in mysterious ways, He isn’t.
Any other time and any other place Marta would draw closer to the brazier for warmth. This time and this place she’s keeping all the distance she can. The idiocy of the question is bald, even to an illiterate farmer’s wife. Do you believe in witchcraft? No, and you contradict Church doctrine; yes, and you’re virtually confessing to occult knowledge at the get-go. How long have you been in the service of Satan? I’m not in the service of Satan. How did you make your pact with him? I have no pact. Is your unborn sired by a demon? No, by my husband. What is the name of the demon with whom you copulated? No demon, sir. Were you sodomized by this demon as well as impregnated?
Abbot Thomas, fifty-eight, tonsured and corpulent with eyes the colour of conkers and a ferociously irritable bowel, would rather Brothers Clement and Martin weren’t here. He has a fiery mind, does Thomas, liable to burst into outraged combustion at the slightest provocation. Marta, naked, shaved, innocent of all charges, already constitutes more than slight provocation. The thought of Marta (or Wilhomena, or Inge, or Elise or whoever), which is perpetual in the hot pudding of his brain, is perennial provocation. He’s a beautifully divided being, Thomas. A great, sane part of him knows that the girls are tortured and slaughtered for his pleasure and profit. A great and sane part of him knows this. But another part of him demands moral justification. Demands it loudly. Bellows for it. This ignites the fiery mind. (You’ve phoned in sick, haven’t you? Nothing wrong with you of course. Just can’t Face It today. You’ve prepared the husky speech, the wobbly or frustrated diagnosis – bloody flu – and damn you if by the time you’ve hung up you’re not sure you haven’t got the flu. Humans: need a lie desperately enough and you can take yourself in. Ditto with Abbot Thomas. The blades slide under the fingernails and the wretches’ confessions come pouring out. My God I was right! Infernal bitch! You dared deceive God’s holy minister? Thank Heaven I held to the odious task!)
The Pricker is called in to search for the witch’s mark. Third nipple, scar, mole, pimple, freckle, wen, wart, birthmark, scratch, scab – pretty much anything in the blemish family qualifies. The Pricker – crew-cut, long-faced, missing an eye – who’ll be well paid should he successfully detect a sign of witchhood (100 per cent success rate so far) spends a good deal of time examining Marta’s clitoris, which he’s not sure isn’t large enough to be unmasked as the witch’s teat, before noticing with relief the mole behind her left knee. (’I make this mine,’ Gunter had said to her, kissing it, on their wedding night. ‘And this, and this, and this . . .’) He turns her over on her belly the better to see while I drop my flakes of flame onto the clerical genitals and Franciscan lust fills the ether like the odour of sweet and sour pork. The Pricker reaches into his pocket and takes out a greasy leather wallet. Marta’s tears (I don’t think there can be a God . . . If there’s a God, how is it that –) wet the stone floor. The pterodactyl shadow shudders, seems to elongate, then subsides. From the wallet the Pricker removes one of several bright needles of various lengths and girths. He turns his back to the now hot-faced Brothers, brings the needle close to the mole, does nothing for a moment, then turns. ‘My lords. It is my sad duty to report that this woman is beyond doubt a witch. I pricked this mark behind her knee and yet as your own ears will attest she made not the slightest sound.’ He hadn’t had to think about it. Long experience – that is to say years of pricking – had taught him which blots were insensible and which receptive. This wretched girl was practically alight with sensitivity. Prick her anywhere and she’d yowl the roof down. Therefore the report of pricking instead. He went in more and more for the reporting of successfully carried-out prickings rather than actual prickings themselves these days. The going rate was the same either way.
You’ll excuse me if I don’t dwell. The same questions, this time with torturous inducements to answer differently. For two minutes and eight seconds Marta holds out. There are precisely two minutes eight seconds’ worth of faith in her tank. But, understandably, after they’ve broken the second finger and the crucified Christ has shown no sign of superheroically coming down to her rescue, nor the Virgin of surrounding her with an impenetrable corona of maternal protection, Marta starts to blab. Not that that helps, since the Inquisitors’ agenda has nothing to do with her admission of guilt. The two younger Brothers, Clement and Martin, know it’s me. They know, deep down, it can’t really be God’s work to tear off a woman’s nipple with pincers. They know it’s me – but to Hell with it anyway, since it feels better than anything they’ve felt before, since there’s nothing, nothing like it on earth (nor, they’ll wager later, over the rough local wine and peppered fish, in Heaven, either). Abbot Thomas, on the other hand, manages on and off to wrap mutilations in psalms. There are flashes of doing God’s will like patches of blue in an otherwise dirty and flocculent sky. He can’t quite give himself over to the truth of himself, and his absurd oscillation between bloodlust and bogus rationalization is piquant to me, vastly to be preferred over Clement and Martin’s white bread surrender.
You might wonder, by the way, what God and the angelic host in Heaven are doing while all this is going on. Wonder no more. I, Lucifer, can tell you. Nothing. They’re doing nothing. They’re watching. The infinitely merciful part of His nature swallows a sob or two, it’s true, but the infinitely indifferent part keeps its gaze steady. There is a tradition, established by those blathering early martyrs and all but vanished in modern times, of offering one’s suffering up to God. The winkled out eyeball, the screwed thumb, the plucked tongue and toasted bot – the right disposition can lift them from the body and send them floating up to God like exquisite perfumes. The Divine nostrils inhale them and sweet indeed is their odour. (You might think there’s something obscene about it, but it will get you into Heaven.) So should you find yourself under vexatious interrogation one day, offer your shocked bollocks up to God. Next time your hole’s rudely invaded by a red hot poker lift your eyes to Heaven and say: ‘This one’s for you, my Lord.’
Marta, I’m sorry to say, isn’t offering her sufferings up to God. Marta’s providing her Franciscan hosts with confirmation that the other names they have on their list (Bertolt’s list, complete with colour of hair, age, vital statistics, and likelihood of intact maidenheads) are those of her sisters in witchcraft. You should hear her description – or rather her endorsement of their description – of the Sabbat. Christ, I wish I’d been there. Butchered babies, bestiality, coprophilia, necrophilia, paedophilia, incest (Abbot Thomas is looking forward to interviewing those twin Schelling sisters), sodomy, desecration of holy objects, blasphemy – a five-star knees-up if ever there was one. When this confession is read out publicly in three days’ time the good people of Uffenstadt are going to see Marta in a whole new light. (It’s going to put some pep back into stagnant boudoirs, too, so that’s nice.) In three days’ time, Marta, or what’s left of her, will state that this is her true confession, given freely, without compulsion of any kind (else there’ll be compulsion all over again, of a by now familiar kind) shortly before they march her up to the stake. Gunter, restrained by civic officers, will watch, screaming, while they cut open his wife’s womb and rip out the foetus – redundantly, since mum’s going up in
