INVENTIVE BOSS
Executions

    Don’t get me wrong, I like being an executioner. Its not hard work and it does have its perks. I get to use any women that come my way unless the duke says otherwise. Most of the time all I have to do is keep my tools and equipment in good shape and wait for those who are sent to me for punishment. But there’s this problem you see. The duke thinks he’s an inventor. Likes to tinker with things. I’ll admit he’s got some good ideas like that new pear he came up with. Being able to expand either inside or at the opening itself is nice and the option of having the spikes is a good idea. The smith went crazy trying to make it work but somehow he did and its handy to have. But some of the other ideas he has are just awful.
    One day he decided that an axe or a sword wasn’t the right answer for beheading. I tried to talk him out of it. I mean it wasn’t like I was always missing the cut or anything like that. I’m pretty good and the rare times I need two strokes are not my fault. I can’t help it if they move can I? Anyway he gets this idea and he goes off with the smith to build whatever it was he figured would be better. So they show up down in the dungeon one day with this thing. It had a block with two square sticks on each side. Then there was this big heavy blade with extensions on each side that fit between the sticks. On top there was a big flat anvil area. A large hammer completed the mess. I understood what he was trying to do but I knew it wouldn’t work right. I tried to explain it to him but he just had to try it out right away. Like a kid with a new toy he gets sometimes. We had this poxy old whore that he condemned right on the spot and she got to be the first person to try out the new device. 
    Well let me tell you things didn’t go too well. First of all the damn blade weighed about fifty pounds and damn near strangled the poor woman after we sat it on the back of her neck. I tried to tell them that no matter how hard I hit the anvil there was no way it would make a clean cut but I had to show then before they believed me. I ended up whacking it six times before her head came off but I think she was dead by the forth blow. Her neck broke at the first so she didn’t feel too much but overall it was kind of sad. I mean I have my pride. Unless ordered to make somebody suffer I like to do a neat workmanlike job of killing. I kept the thing around and one day I got the smith to take the cutting edge off and I use it for breaking bones. Works better than the wheel and is less work for me. Lifting that damn wheel and slamming it down is hard work. 
    Another time the boss got this idea for a new rack. He figured having it stand on end would save space and by putting the head down there would be more suffering. It would have been alright if he’d set it up so either end could go up at the top but he didn’t. Another old whore got to try this one out. If he keeps it up there wouldn’t be any cheap whores left. Of course being hung upside down knocked her out in less than an hour just like I knew it would. Still I kind of liked the idea of a vertical rack and there was room so I changed it around and still use it today. Works fine as long as the head is up.
    Some of his ideas work sort of, some lead to other useful things and some are just bad from the git go. He heard someplace about moors that killed captives by bending two trees over and tying them to stakes. A leg was tied to each tree and the ropes to the stakes cut. The action of the trees springing back up was supposed to rip the victim in two from the crotch up. Well he just had to try it. He had men out looking for two trees that would work for days. Finally two were found and another whore was taken out to them. I hadn’t been out there before but when I saw the setup I figured there was going to be trouble. Maybe the moors have got different trees that we do but the only ones that seemed willing to bend enough was a pair of birches. The poor whore had one ankle tied to each tree and the ropes holding them bent over were cut. As planned the trees snapped back upright but not all the way. You see birches are soft and flexible and not the strongest trees around. They did a fine job of spreading the whore’s legs and from the sounds she was making it hurt like hell but she was still in one piece. Now what, she was about twenty feet up in the air with a leg pointed each way and her body hanging down. I’ve got to hand it to the boss. He’s good at covering it up when he screws up. He just looked up at her and then ordered me to have a guard posted to keep anybody from doing anything and made some statement about how he figured that killing a whore by hanging her by her spread legs seemed fitting. Smooth as butter he was. She lasted almost all night but I never heard anything more about trees and splitting people again.
    You know that executions are free entertainment and the people love to watch some poor bastard suffer while he dies. A nice long air dance or two just makes some folk’s day. Well the boss got to trying different ways of hanging people. I’d always figured that having a cart pulled out from under them worked just fine. A horse was about as good and there’s something about a naked broad sliding down a horse’s back and swinging that gets to a man. Turning them off a ladder works OK but it’s a lot of work for me. I once tried just pushing them off the edge of the scaffold but it didn’t work out so good. They kept hitting the edge and it really kept them from dancing very good. Anyway he got this idea of how to hang them better, he had a trap door cut in the middle of a scaffold and had the gallows beam mounted over the top of the hole. A stick held the trap closed while I got the noose around her neck. He thought that the rope out be long enough to let her drop down far enough so that she was all the way under the scaffold floor. That way everybody could get a look at the last dance. What the hell, he’s the boss. I got her rigged up and the stick was pulled away. The trap opened just fine and she disappeared through it. The rope snapped taunt and for a second I thought the whole damn scaffold was coming down but it stayed up. When she hit the end of the rope there was a loud snap like a stick breaking, She bounced and twisted but never so much as moved a toe. Nothing but some quivering, not even any gasping for breath, nothing but a creak of the rope and the dripping of her piss. Needless to say those watching were not happy. It was a pretty poor show. I figured out that she’d broken her neck when she hit the end of the rope and of course had died right away. I kind of thought that maybe we were on to something but the boss was so embarrassed that he flat forbid me from ever trying it again. I had the trap filed in with a solid floor and installed a pulley system. From then on we just lifted them off the floor with the pulleys and let them swing. Worked real nice. I still used a horse once in a while just because I liked it so well and the crowd seemed to like the change too. 
    Like I said I’ve got a good boss but I worry about what he’s going to come up with next.