Lucas is arrested for witchcraft in the name of the King and on behalf of the Inquisition. His unbaptized slave has practiced innocent magic and his estranged mistress has fabricated evidence. He once saw a man racked. He is in danger of being burned. He orders the slave to confess to anything to avoid torture. A Dominican represents the Inquisition here as in the alpha timeline in The Shield Of Time.
We, or at least I, can only say what a dreadful regime and how good it is that it is now centuries in the past.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Unfortunately, torture/burning alive is not a centuries past phenomenon. I recall reading in the first vol. of THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO Solzhenitsyn's description, sometimes with angry black humor, of how brutally the Cheka/MVD/KGB carried out the will of Lenin and Stalin, including the use of torture. And one of the warlords ravaging Haiti, nicknamed "Barbecue," has been accused of burning people alive, apparently just for fun.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that things like cordoning off the scene of a crime just didn't occur to people back then.
Anderson/Lucas mentions that.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It took so long for methods of police investigation to really improve! It was only after about 1900 that things like fingerprinting, cordoning off crime scenes, studying blood spatter, photographing of criminals/suspects, etc., became standard.
Ad astra! Sean
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