I had never smelled burning flesh before, and had no care to. Naturally, I'd had roast meats, but living flesh burns a different way. Did you know that? When its alive, it responds, reacts, like it knows what's happening.
That's what I was watching when we hoisted her up on the stake, ignored her pleas for mercy, set the fire to the kindling bunched about her feet and calves. I didn't want to look at her eyes as they desperately tried to hold my own, to appeal to a humanity in me that I'm not sure she could have found if she'd searched for years. I definitely didn't want to look at her face when her clothes caught aflame and she could do nothing but scream and feel it, scream louder, feel it more. When do they stop feeling it, I wonder? Never aloud, of course, not to another soul, but I do wonder it nonetheless. When does the flesh give in to the flames?
I watched her skin blister, like bark peeling away from crackling firewood. I saw her turn every shade of pink and red until only the ashen silhouette of her smouldering, inert body remained, like a shadow given form. Crisp. Near skeletal. She burned for so long. No-one wanted to be the first to leave, to turn their heads. Oh, but they all stopped their cheering and clamouring a long time before that. It's around the time the choking starts that the crowd loses their appetite for justice, or whatever the virtue of the day is. But they stay. They stay and watch, all the way to the end.
When she's roasted, properly grilled, all the way to the bone, there's nothing left to look at. There's only the cracks of the kindling to hear. But the smell.
The smell is sickening. Not because it's awful, though gods know I wish it was. Because it makes your mouth water. We're just meat, in the end, and the body knows it. The nose smells meat cooking and tells the rest of you that dinner's served.
Animals, all the way down. That woman couldn't have found a scrap of human in me, not ever. Just beast atop beast. We can't turn away from that any more than we can turn our heads to stop watching a woman burn and die.
It's been days. I can't stop hearing, seeing, smelling the whole damn thing from start to finish. When I wake up in the morning, I wake from dreams of fire, and meat. Sometimes I'm the fire. Sometimes I'm the meat. I go through my day, tormented by the aroma of beef and pork in the market, wincing when I pass a lit torch, immobilised by the foggy clumps of smoke rising out of a brazier in the evening. And then I go to bed, back to the dreams, wondering whether this time I'll be flame or fuel.
We burn seven witches a week, on average. Ten on special occasions. If it's a slow week, we make a spectacle of it. Tie a little powder-bag around one of their necks. Some of the other witch hunters like to bet on what'll be inside – powder to make the flames turn green, or powder to blow her head off. The problem is, they can't all be witches. There's no way at all they'd let themselves burn en masse, if they were so powerful – and if they weren't powerful, why burn them? If some of them are innocent, that's as good as all of them.
I told my reverend about my doubts. He assured me that the Eternal Flame burns only the wicked, and that if they were truly innocent they would feel nothing, would be unscathed by the flames. I told him to hold his hand in the brazier, then, since he would have nothing to fear, and if he could do so all my concerns would be laid to rest. The reverend said faith that required proof wasn't faith at all.
I'm starting to think he might be right. I have a theory of my own to match his. The theory is this: a god that requires stakes and fire to dispense justice is no real god.
We burned two more last night. I excused myself after I lit the kindling, and disappeared between a tavern and a house nearby to empty my guts onto the cobbles. They were glossy with rain, and soon ran slick with the thin gruel of my vomit too; I hadn't eaten anything in days. My appetite had left me, and I'd given up the pretense with it. When I returned, I saw the reverend murmuring something to one of the other witch hunters, looking my way. He held my gaze as I approached and apologised. Neither seemed convinced by my food poisoning alibi.
They suspect me as a sympathiser. The Church of the Eternal Fire has one punishment for sympathisers, apostates and heretics.
They only have one punishment for every sin.
They came knocking earlier today. There wasn't much ceremony to the rest of it: dragged down to the reverend, they told me to confess my apostasy. They'd been watching a while, apparently. It wasn't hard to get corroborating reports from the other witch hunters; I wasn't well liked. They thought I considered myself superior because I didn't gamble or joke at the executions like they did. I refused to confess initially, so they threatened me with torture, and I conceded immediately. Perhaps you think that's weak of me, that I should have held out to the last like heroes do in stories, but I've been in a torture chamber before. No-one's a hero for long.
They sentenced me to the stake. I only have a day to wait in the cell, which is a small mercy, I suppose. There's a woman in the cell across, and she thinks I'm mad; I keep apologising to her. Just 'I'm so sorry', over and over again, every time I see her. I'm sorry for what's going to happen to us. But more than that, I'm sorry for all those that came before her, all those I burned because it was easier not to fight the Church. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was weak. She doesn't respond to me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.
It plays out like in my nightmares, and finally I know: I was fuel all along. Jeering, leering faces below me. Cruel masks, clad in torchlight and shadows. I don't recognise anyone, even though I know many of them well. The faceless crowd roars as the flames catch around my feet. Smoke blinds me. My nostrils are filled, overwhelmed, seared all the way down my throat and I involuntarily struggle against the ropes, against knots I myself have fastened a hundred times to prevent any chance of coming loose. But I struggle anyway. Animal instincts are hard to suppress like that.
I suppose that's why my mouth waters at the scent of my own broiling flesh.