and bloodshot eyes.
“I promise that you will leave this room unharmed if you just give me those names,” he said.
“But I don’t know them.”
“You expect us to believe that?” said Popel.
“Why are you answering badly? Why can’t you tell us the names?”
“Because knowledge of them is the domain of men alone.”
The bishop was struck by this admission. It certainly fit the evidence.
“Why do you insist on telling lies?” said Popel, who hadn’t made the connection.
One of the correctors leaned on the machine, clearly bored by the slow progress. “Of course she hasn’t told you the truth, we haven’t even put the frigging weights on her yet.”
But the bishop called Popel aside and explained that the girl’s mere knowledge of forbidden practices was not enough to proceed with prosecution in this matter. They had to have proof of actual witchcraft.
So they agreed to follow the standard procedure.
The bishop returned and made a show of entreating the correctors to release the girl.
The correctors shrugged and loosened the ropes just enough to allow her to lower her arms. The bishop had them offer her some more water, then he softened his voice and told her that she could save her mother and herself from beheading or (if the judges were being lenient) strangulation, and then being burnt at the stake, if she would simply confess the truth and tell him the names of the unbelievers who dared to use the name of God to conjure devils and perpetrate other acts of evil.
He saw the last bit of hope drain out of her, and the only thing that she confessed was that she couldn’t possibly comply with his request.
The bishop looked down at the girl’s tender little feet, and started slowly shaking his head, as if it deeply disturbed him to have to do this.
“Then you leave me no choice but to insist that you be examined in the usual way.”
The correctors perked up like a pair of Rottweilers picking up the scent of raw meat. They retightened the ropes, yanked the girl’s arms over her head, and proceeded to strip off her clothes.
She screamed, as they almost always did, then the bishop cringed from a sudden pain in his gut. So he let Popel take over the search.
They commenced shaving all the hair off her body, including the secret parts that must not be named, in search of the truth. Now, in the bishop’s native Germany, it was not considered delicate to shave the pubes, so he turned and looked the other way.
But it wasn’t long before Popel triumphantly ejaculated, “Here it is. The mark of the Devil.”
“That’s not the mark of the Devil,” the girl insisted. “That’s a birthmark I’ve had since I was a child.”
“That’s just the sort of perverse lie the Devil would make you say.”
The bishop examined the spot closely.
“Keep looking,” he said.
“Yes, my lord.”
The girl stiffened but gave little resistance as they continued to shave her down below, because the masked men approached the task with some measure of propriety. But their patience was wearing thin, and they were much rougher with the thick, dark hair on her head. And halfway through the process, their efforts were rewarded.
“My lord, come and look at this.”
The bishop bent close to look. The girl had a curved scar nearly two inches long behind her left ear that was much lighter than the surrounding skin, just like so many other scars he had seen that had been made as a result of carnal copulation with the Devil.
“Stick it with pins,” he commanded.
And when the girl felt no pain in that place, he knew that the mark could only have been made by the Devil’s claw. And that changed everything.
The girl insisted that she had gotten the scar years ago when a drunken Christian hit her in the head with a bottle and left a deep gash, and that ever since that day she had no feeling in the area, but he knew that they would soon get at the truth. And so he gave the order:
“Begin the Inquisitionsprozess.”
THEY PUT YOU THROUGH THE same paces every single time, thought Bishop Stempfel. First they denied all the charges, then you induced them to tell the truth, and you went back and forth with the same questions over and over until the easy ones broke and the stubborn ones dug in their heels, while the scribe mechanically copied it all down. Every question, every answer, pausing only to change quills or stifle a yawn.
Perhaps the