"On your knees," thundered the pirate, pointing to the deck.

"Why not make me, senor?" replied the girl, tossing her pretty head coquettishly.

Smack! The vicious backhanded slap sent her reeling to the deck.

"I see that I must teach you respect," he said, noting the flare of interest in the girl's hot eyes.

Her name was Carmen Montero, and her mistress was Maria Isabel de Talamanca, only daughter of the Marques de Santa Flora, Viceroy of His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip III.

The caravel carrying the two girls to Spain had been about three hundred miles southwest of Santo Domingo when El Diablo's dark-shrouded vessel had loomed up on them out of the mist.

"Pirates!" the bow lockout had yelled, awakening Maria out of her beauty sleep. But the pirate vessel was too close, and his warning cry had virtually no time for the crew of the caravel to prepare for battle. The first charge of grapeshot fired from a swivel gun on the prow of the oncoming vessel had torn out the lookout's throat. The rail of the pirate ship was lined with armed men already preparing grappling lines for throwing. And, since such freebooters typically carried a crew of several hundred, the fight to seize the carvel had been short and swift.

The blood-stained pirates had been quick to locate Maria and Carmen, since they had been established in the captain's cabin for the trip to Spain. Now, coarse hands seized the two and dragged them out to the gore-spatter main deck, where the butchered corpses of the caravel's crew were even then being flung to the sharks.

Now the two young women lay on the bloody planks. Carmen was hot-eyed, aroused, and excited by the bloodshed, looking about her with obvious interest. In contrast, her mistress looked to be and was almost maddened with panic, a picture of fear. The sight of her made the big mestizo's cruel lips twist in contempt.

"Get up, you Spanish sow," he snarled, seizing the young noblewoman by the hair and jerking her forward onto her hands and knees. Shaking like a leaf, Maria obeyed.

The pirate's eyes took in the full curve of her body - the tininess of her waist, her youthful, well-fleshed thighs, the soft swell of her belly under her nightgown, and her half-naked breasts straining against the shimmering satin of her nightdress. He licked his thick, sensuous lips and wondered how she would react when he handed her over to his torturers.

Then he turned his gaze once again on her maid.

The man was a giant - all solid, whipcord muscle. But it was his eyes that sent a shiver of masochistic excitement through Carmen's sex-hungry body. Those eyes were cruel and cat-green and fixed on her intently. She felt them linger on the full, lush undersides of her bosom where her dress fabric hugged her breasts tightly. His gaze dropped, as those magnetic eyes seemed to see through the material of her dress, focusing on her narrow waist, her swelling hips, and her firm, shapely thighs. Maria fancied that he could even discern her deeply cleft navel, the plump lips and the dark hair framing her sex, and the almost impudent upthrust of her buttocks.

"You approve, senor?" said Maria, rubbing her hands down her dress, smoothing the material. Her smile was an open invitation.

The mestizo stepped forward and grabbed the skirt of her dress in his fist, while Maria made no protest, only looking back at him intently. Like a stock-breeder handling a piece of horseflesh, El Diablo lifted her hem and stared at what was revealed: Her black stocking tops, her garters, and the hint of intimate white flesh revealed in the shadowed sunlight. Then he dropped the hem and leaned back on the heels of his leather sea-boots.

"For shame, Carmen!" sprang the involuntary exclamation from Maria's trembling lips. Then, seeing the instant rage in El Diablo's face, she cowered back in terror.

The big pirate's reaction was immediate and brutal. He slapped her, smashing his open palm on her white cheek so that she wrenched back like a twisted marionette.

"Si, senor, you hit her." Carmen's voice was eager, and the mestizo grinned at her.

"You enjoy seeing your mistress hurt?" he asked.

"Yes, senor. In fact, I would not mind seeing her hurt worse," Carmen said. "What do you say, senor? I know how to be nice to a man . . how to be very nice."

"As for her," she hissed viciously, pointing a quivering finger at Maria, "I'd enjoy seeing her roasted alive!"

"Carmen!" cried Maria, instinctively, as the horror of what her maid was saying rang in her ears and inspired a sudden flush of anger that overcame her fear. "You ungrateful little slut! Wait till we get back to Spain!"

"Quiet!" Carmen barked the command harshly at her erstwhile mistress before clutching the pirate's arm, digging her fingernails in. "Make her keep quiet, senor!" she pleaded. Make the bitch keep quiet!"

Thwack!

"Ahhh!" Maria cried, staggering back onto the deck.

"That's right, kick her, beat her, make her crawl." Carmen's tone was venomous, and she licked her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. Leaning close to El Diablo, she said softly, "Do you want me to describe what I'd like to see you do to her, senor?"

The pirate's arm was like a coiled python around Carmen's waist as he said, "Tell me!"

Lying heaped on the deck, her back wrenched by sobs of mind-numbing horror, Maria could hardly believe that the girl she heard speaking was her servant.

"I'd like to see you string her up by her thumbs and tear her gown from her until she's naked," Carmen said, smiling venomously at the noblewoman. "Then I'd like you use your belt on her, whipping her soft, pampered, naked flesh until it turned red with welts! I'd like to see you make little cuts with the knife at your hip and then sprinkle salt into the cuts! I'd like to see you rape her, and I'd like to see all your men do the same. But carefully! Don't hurt her, just rape her and send a letter to her precious father, the Viceroy, telling him you've despoiled his treasured daughter!"

Maria could not believe that the vile, sadistic suggestions pouring like dark rot from Carmen's red lips were being spoken by the girl she had accepted as her personal maid and companion.

"I'd like to see her roasted alive!" Carmen continued.

"You've already said that," said El Diablo interestedly.

"But you need to do it slowly, so she feels it! So she knows she's going to die! But that has to come later! First you need to hurt her, jab splinters into her soft, pampered flesh, especially those big teats of hers, and then light them, so they burn down to that ivory skin she takes such great pride in! Stake her out on the ground near an ant bed, like the natives do, and dribble a trail of honey up to her love nest, so the ants can feast on her flesh! Tie her so her feet are up in the air and use switches to lash the soles of her feet..."

As the utterly depraved syllables defiled the clean morning air, Maria finally had to concede that it was Carmen speaking them, Carmen who was listing all those terrible things she wanted to do to her. At last, she had to admit that this pretty Valencian girl, who had pretended to be her friend, who had waited on her with a smile on her face, had concealed depths of sadistic perversion undreamed of behind her happy face.

At last, the foul monologue came to a panting end as the wind soughed softly through the ship's rigging. El Diablo stroked Carmen softly like a cat.

"So, my pigeon, it's blood you want," he growled, and Carmen nodded eagerly. El Diablo nodded to one of the half-naked pirates crowded around Maria and pointed his finger at the cowering girl, snarling, "Take her back to our ship and lock her in with the other prisoners. Make sure she's securely bound so she can't hurt herself or escape, but use soft ropes. I want that smooth skin of hers untouched until we get her back to Tortuga."

Tortuga was a natural haven for pirates. All about was the mystery of the tropics, the sensation of never-ceasing life - creeping, stalking, flying. Life primeval and intense...hunting man and hunting beast...the gleam of bared fangs and the glint of steel blade...the very air scented with the languorous odor of exotic blooms, musical with the hum of multi-colored insects. Gay-plumaged birds flew over its lush jungle. Flamingoes and herons splashed in the shallows of its inland lakes. And outside the coral reefs guarding its sheltering cove, the sinister black dorsal fins of a dizzying variety of deadly sharks crisscrossed the glassy surface of the sea.

It was this deadly paradise that El Diablo had chosen for his base.

For years, Castilian warships had ranged the Main, hunting this sadistic monster who had so aptly earned his sobriquet, "The Devil." In just a few short years, he had spread terror throughout Hispaniola - capturing and later sinking merchant ships laden with the loot of the Americas, sacking whole towns with the assistance of other pirate ships, and turning over scores of haughty Spanish senoritas to the not-so-tender mercies of his flesh-craving crew.

But he retained the wives and daughters of the hated Spanish overlords for himself.

News traveled slowly in those days, when news was only as fast as the slow merchant ships that carried it, so it was months before Maria's father, the Viceroy, was informed of her disappearance along with all aboard the ship carrying her home to Spain. His face was reported to have gone gray at the possibility that she had fallen into the hands of El Diablo. The only comment of her heart-stricken father was his whisper, "God help the poor child," as he thought of her in the hands of that monster. But even he never considered her fate could have been as ghastly as events finally revealed.

Maria remained bound below-decks in El Diablo's ship until he dropped anchor at Tortuga. There she had been taken ashore with her captor's other prisoners and locked in a stockade reserved for his "special" guests. She found herself thrown together in that small, squalid space with other women captured by the savage corsairs. But her companions in misery were different from what she expected - they were ladies, aristocrats like herself. Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish noblewomen swept from the bloodstained decks of ships and from the blazing towns sacked by pirates were confined here, dressed in whatever rags they were wearing when captured, awaiting their fate, whatever that was.

Many of them did not have to wait long, for they were taken out in ones and twos and never returned. In Maria's case, she waited three days and nights, and they came for her at the stroke of midnight.

The night was moonless, but the unclouded stars thinned the darkness so the bulks of pines lining the shore were just distinguishable. The rough pirates who forced her along a path only laughed at her when she tried to put on the hauteur of an aristocrat and demanded to know where she was being taken. She found out all too soon, and her arrival was presaged by the sounds of screams that floated through the tropical night and got steadily louder and louder. Women's screams. Screams shrill with pain, sounding to Maria as if they were being torn from souls descending the steps leading to Hell.

She was not far wrong.

Her destination was a cave that went far back into the volcanic mountain that loomed before her in the dark. Red light emerged from the mouth of that cave, and the screams, now so loud they hurt her ears, were clearly coming from inside. She jerked backwards against the strong arms pulling her along, drawing another laugh from the massively strong hands that held her effortlessly, as if all her strength, even fueled by her terrified desperation, was less than nothing.

The pirates pulled her inside that portal, which opened into a larger cave flooded with reddish light.

The cave seemed to be red from top to bottom - everything was red, burning the eyeballs, like a great bowl of blood, lit by a multitude of torches and fires, with the smoke being drawn upward by some hidden vent-hole in the top of the cave. But it was not the red light that made Maria catch her breath in horror and disgust. Now she saw where the aristocratic females who had been removed had been taken.

A nude woman hung by her wrists from a rope that disappeared into the gloom of the ceiling, her feet clear of the floor, while a pirate sent his cat-o-nine-tails curling around the plumpness of her lush hips. Maria didn't know the name of this dreaded whip, but she could see the glint of metal at the tip of each thong as the pirate expertly jerked it backwards, uncurling it from the hips of the tortured woman and leaving bleeding welts behind while she spun around dizzily. A crowd of pirates and native women lounged about, watching her agony in evident enjoyment. Maria felt sick as she saw the many similar cuts and welts up and down the column of the madly screaming woman, and she felt certain she was watching a woman who was being flogged to death.

In another place, a young woman appeared to be trying to reach the floor, which was two feet below her straining toes. She also had a small crowd of onlookers watching her ordeal. At first, Maria could not understand the desperation of the naked female so vainly trying to touch the ground, but then it struck her that there was no rope suspending this woman. She appeared to be supported by...

Maria retched in sudden realization that the mewling woman was supported only by the six-inch wooden stake with its base driven into the floor of the cavern and with its upper end disappearing into the juncture of the woman's legs. The reason for her desperation was that the point of the stake on which she sat had penetrated into her belly, stretching and tearing her womanly orifice until it admitted the hellish intruder. The darker stain on the wooden that disappeared into the woman's groin was clearly her blood. Her life's blood.

But the sight that greeted her in the center of the cave was the most horrifying of all. A long pit had been dug into the ground and was filled to the brim by a mound of redly glowing embers, and above the coals, slowly turning in the searing heat that rose from the coals, was the squirming, scorched body of a girl who could be no older than herself.

She was naked and had been cruelly tied to a spit of wood supported by rock supports at each end of the fire-pit. Screams of mortal agony were being torn from her throat as one of the native women turned the spit, making sure that the heat reached every portion of the young girl, who Maria now recognized as having been taken from the stockade earlier in the day. The native woman only laughed at the screams of the young aristocrat, clearly enjoying the agony of the hated white woman, whose body had been turned from white to red by the searing heat. She pointed to the roasting girl and made a comment in her native tongue to her friends sitting with their men around the fire-pit, drawing peals of laughter to join her own.

Maria suddenly saw her maid, Carmen, lying at El Diablo's feet, her red lips twisted in a leer of such cruelty that Maria instinctively surmised what was going to happen to her. The sheer horror of it made her feel faint with terror, but icy fear clutching her heart in fingers of ice brought her back to her senses. In her mind's eye, she again saw and heard Carmen declaring that she wanted to roast her mistress alive. She began to struggle wildly at her captors, fighting for her very life.

As in a nightmare, she saw that Carmen was virtually naked in front of all these men, wearing only black silk stockings fastened by indecent-looking garters of scarlet lace. Though many of the native women were also wearing nothing, Carmen had been her maid and companion. Seeing Carmen in such proud lewdness was a complete rejection of everything Maria thought she had shared with other girl. Even more horrifying was the attitude of Carmen, who was laughing at and enjoying the hideous moans and screams being torn from the throat of the naked girl roasting on the spit.

As the pirates dragged her nearer her erstwhile companion, Maria began to fight like an animal, but they again held her as easily as if she had been a little child. Carmen shrieked with glee at Maria's struggles and her horror, shouting to her companions, "To the fire with the aristocratic bitch!"

Suddenly, Maria was surrounded by pirates and their scantily clad or nude native companions. They pressed close, like a pack of flesh-hungry ghouls. They prodded her plump body approvingly, muttering obscenities among themselves and laughing uproariously at crude jokes in some language Maria didn't understand.

If the men pressing about her had been, in fact, nothing more than naked savages, it would have been horrible enough. But because they were partly European and were dressed in European clothes, the scene took on an added touch of horror.

Carmen rose and came to join her new-found friends, and their enjoyment rose to a fever pitch as their leader's paramour herself reached out and ripped the remnants of her former mistress' torn nightdress from her, exposing Maria's feminine curves to the pirates' lecherous gaze. Maria had never been naked in front of a man, but her nudity meant little to her now, not compared to the terror clutching her throat at the hideousness of the fate confronting her.

She was moaning for mercy now, pleading desperately for her life, ready to do anything to save herself from the agony of the fire. But the pirates ignored her pleadings, howling with laughter at her pitiful struggles, and the laughter was led by her former maid.

"Listen to the sow squeal!" Carmen gloated and then ordered the pirates to turn Maria's head and make her look at the girl turning in the searing heat.

"Look at what's going to happen to you!" she hissed. "Can you imagine how much she's suffered? And she's been cooking for hours, and she's not yet cooked all the way through! But look beside her! See? We've been preparing your own bridal bed! You won't exactly lie in this bed, since you'll be above it, but it's where you'll spend the rest of your miserable life!"

Maria screamed in horror as she saw, for the first time that a second bed of fire had been prepared, with a mounded bed of glowing coals and a companion spit supported by stones at each end. Those stone supports had clearly been carved for the job they were doing, with a slot cut at the top of each to accept a pole.

"Get on with it!" she commanded the pirates about Maria. "My mistress is anxious to join her fellow aristocrat in their bridal beds! Beds of fire!" And she erupted with a peal of laughter that was joined by the other pirates, who immediately swung into action. While two of them held her, a third bound her wrists behind her and lashed them together. He was equally quick to wrap ropes - coarse ropes this time, not like the soft ropes that had bound her on El Diablo's ship - about her wrists and knees.

Maria cried out as she was roughly flung to the ground. The spit was removed from the fire and brought over to her, where it was shoved through the ropes that secured her legs and wrists. Maria cried out again as the spit touched the skin along her naked back, since it was blazing hot from being over the fire. Short poles were shoved between her body and her arms before being lashed to her elbows and the spit. A similar pole went behind her knees and was lashed to her knees and the spit. Ropes around her ankles, waist, and her forehead held her firmly to the spit, ensuring she would not slip as the spit was turned.

El Diablo prodded Carmen, who had come back to lie with her lover, with his toe. "Go on, my pigeon!" he cried. "Help put your mistress over the fire! Show my men that you are indeed the Devil's own!"

"With pleasure," the dark-haired beauty chuckled, standing up, almost nude in the red firelight. A silence fell over the pirates, as they looked in admiration at this sadistic beauty whose cruelty and bestiality was to match their own. Lines of flickering light crept over her ivory skin, starting at her ankles, moving up her long, silken legs and thighs, over the curve of her belly, and across the rosy mounds of her breasts. Her dark nipples were stiff with arousal. She walked toward Maria's trussed body with an indolent, hip-rolling walk.

"Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" Maria shrieked, her protest a long, drawn-out wail of ultimate horror, her eyes bulging almost out of their sockets.

But Carmen's red lips only parted in a smile, as she bent and grabbed one end of the spit while one of the pirates grabbed the other. The young noblewoman, screaming and struggling like a pig in a slaughter house, was carried over to the fire. Sudden heat surrounded her naked body as her spit was placed in the notches carved for it, and one of the native women jumped up, fitted a crosspiece into one end of the spit, and began to turn it.

The young Spanish noblewoman was being roasted alive.

Carmen returned to El Diablo, laughing gleefully at the ghastly shrieks of pain that came from her agonized mistress. Boldly, she turned to him and whispered into his ear. His eyes gleamed and he nodded. Carmen bent and loosened his belt, and he lifted his hips as she pulled his trousers down to his ankles, revealing his wonderfully enhanced masculinity at full and rigid arousal. Turning around, she let El Diablo pull her down atop him, purring with delight as she felt his cock slide into the tightness of her back passage. She let herself sink down until the full length of that massive member was completely embedded inside her. Then she began to move, her eyes avidly drinking in the suffering of her nude mistress as Maria rotated slowly in the searing heat, shrieking maniacally. Soon, El Diablo could stand no more of the delicious agony of Carmen moving up and down so slowly, and he buried his fingers in her fleshy hips. The maid chortled with amusement as he began to thrust into her, trying to find her limits, but she accepted all of him, squeezing her anus as she tried to milk his rampant cock. When he reached his climax, he bellowed as Carmen's marvelous muscle control continued milking him until she had pulled every drop of semen from him.

Being roasted alive is an unimaginatively agonizing way to die, especially if done by those knowledgeable enough to keep the suffering captives alive as long as possible. Though Carmen did not yet know how to do that, many of the pirates did, for they enjoyed nothing as much as roasting a haughty and beautiful aristocrat and then feasting on her well-browned body. And Carmen was a quick learner, avid to drink in the knowledge of these men who treated aristocrats as she herself longed to treat them.

After Maria had been roasting about an hour over the smoldering embers, her companion on the other spit finally expired. The well-browned girl was removed and was replaced by a lovely teenaged aristocrat. She and her mother had been captured at sea when journeying to join her father, and both of them had been removed from the stockade at the same time. Now her mother was held apart and forced to watch helplessly as her daughter was stripped naked by the native women and then tied firmly to the long, wooden spit. With a cruelty that impressed her paramour, Carmen had whispered to her paramour, who smiled and gave some whispered instructions of his own. As a result, the young girl's mother, with one of the pirates holding a knife at her side, was forced to pick up one end of the spit and carry her own daughter to the fire and place her end of the spit in the notch of the stone support.

The older woman sobbed in despair at the sight of her daughter suffering helplessly as the young girl began turning as the searing heat that bathed every crevice and inch of her nude body. The girl's desperate and agonized screams were like a knife piercing her mother's heart, and the woman could not stop herself from glancing at the other girl revolving on the other spit as she shrieked in complete agony. She shuddered as she imagined the suffering the other girl must have endured already, and the thought of her precious daughter having to suffer similar excruciating torment was like the stab of an icicle piercing her heart. She tried to pull away and flee the horrifying reality of her daughter's torture and ultimate death, but the pirates just laughed and made her continue to watch.

Carmen watched Maria with an avid gaze, and not even the equally sadistic torment of the younger girl on the other spit could pull her attention away. Her eyes drank in every agonized struggle of her former mistress, and she gloried in the way the fire reflected off Maria's aristocratic loveliness. She knew her mistress' large breasts had soft skin, since she had often washed her in her bath. But she also knew of the firmness of those breasts and the crowning glory of the soft, pink nipples. Now she watched with growing pleasure as the alabaster skin of those marvelous breasts began to turn pinkish in the heat, along with the rest of her nude body.

Time crept by, and Carmen's pleasure deepened as Maria's agony didn't diminish. Her skin had turned red and was in the process of turning brown, and Carmen savored every minute of suffering the formerly lovely aristocrat had to endure in the searing heat.

It took Maria Isabel de Talamanca an eternity to die over the smoldering embers, an eternity watched with the avidity of a vulture by Carmen, who was passed around to some of his officers by El Diablo, who had been totally exhausted by the insatiable girl. She had one orgasm after another as she entertained his officers, but her eyes never left the agonized body of her mistress. She had one final and overwhelming eruption in her belly as she saw Maria, her curvaceous body seared to a dark brown, give one last strident scream before she sagged against her ropes for the final time.

Carmen's scream of fulfilled lust was equally loud, and she sagged back against El Diablo's second-in-command in a release that was very similar to that of her mistress, whose long agony was ended at last.

And, with Maria dead at long last, the mother watching her daughter was thrown to the ground, stripped of the rags of her expensive clothing, and bound to Maria's empty spit. She was quickly raised into the air and placed over the fire at the side of her hapless, shrieking daughter. Her spit began to turn as the searing heat ate at her skin, and two sets of screams again rose to entertain the depraved pirates and their equally bloodthirsty women.

An eyewitness description of the gruesome death of Maria de Talamanca was later obtained from a certain Jose Tacuna, one of El Diablo's crew of torturers and cannibals the night she and so many others were tortured to death. As he was close to being torn asunder on the Rack, the tensions was alternatively applied and then relaxed so every possible detail of that night and many others could be torn from his cracked and bloody lips. As he gave a full and complete account of how the Viceroy's daughter was slaughtered, the descriptions he spewed out were so horrible, so revoltingly inhuman, that even the callous Spanish torturers, so used to plying their trade against others such as Jews and natives in the Americas, paled at hearing of the same torments being applied to one of their own.

After the fullest possible account of her death was committed to paper by the priests in attendance, he was pressed for further details of the depredations of El Diablo. He told how the pirate would have Carmen select two or three lovely captives from his collection in his stockade. The selected girls would be bathed, perfumed, and dressed in plundered dresses and silken underthings before being taken to the cave where Maria had met her horrible end.

But they were not taken there to be butchered - at least not right away. Instead, they would be the pirate's guests for dinner. The girls sighed with relief upon being informed they would not immediately suffer the fate of the other girls who had been taken from the stockade and never returned. But their sighs would turn to gasps of horror as they were led past the elegantly appointed table deeper into the cave, where they found a nude girl tied to the spit and revolving over the fire. She had been almost completely roasted by that time, and the reason her screams hadn't alerted the "guests" as they were escorted to the cave was that she had been gagged most effectively with her own clothing. Smiling at the nauseated expressions of his sickened prisoners, El Diablo would lead them back out to the table, which was set with captured dishes, silverware, and crystal goblets while white-coated pirates waited to serve them. After politely seating the young aristocrats, El Diablo would explain to them that dinner would be served shortly, after the girl's roasting was complete and she was butchered. He would then take great pleasure, Tacuna related, in informing his guests that whichever one of them pleased him least that night would be roasted alive the following evening.

Numb with horror, the terrified young aristocratic ladies outdid one another in their attempts to gratify this sadistic degenerate. Properly raised Spanish gentlewomen, even young nuns, dredged into their imaginations in an attempt to stave off the agony of the fire. And if their imaginations failed them, there was always the lascivious Carmen to suggest new unprintable acts, laughing at their utter humiliation.

But, as the doomed Jose Tacuna divulged, no matter how hard the young ladies tried, there always came a time when the rapacious monster would grew bored. Soon, the tortures would resume, and one or more aristocratic young ladies would find herself screaming in absolute agony as her nude body revolved over the fire.

Unendurable pleasure infinitely prolonged was the perfection El Diablo craved, and the only one who came near to achieving this was the lovely and sadistic Carmen herself. According to Tacuna, she was the only one of his captives to escape death in his special cave. All the others were eventually tortured to death by one means or another, and many of them were roasted alive and eaten.

For well over a decade, this vicious killer pirate turned the seas around Hispaniola into one great slaughterhouse of nightmare and horror. Then his craving for succulent, feminine flesh led him to go too far.

On August 22, 1620, the Royal Spanish galleon, Santa Maria, ostensibly carrying a score of noble young senoritas from Porto Bello to Cadiz, fell in with El Diablo's sinister craft. Word of the galleon's cargo of pulchritude had reached the pirate through his network of spies, and this, plus the fact that the merchant ship's holds were undoubtedly loaded with gold, led him into a trap.

For the Santa Maria was no merchant ship, though her rigging had been changed and she had been repainted to resemble one. Instead, waiting behind painted-over gunports and with much of her crew hidden below, was one of Spain's fastest and most heavily-armed warship. On that August morning, no girls reclined in her cabins, there was no gold in her holds, and a double complement of tough Spanish soldiery waited below with the rest of the naval crew.

Cutting gently to larboard, so as not to lose too much headway, the Santa Maria suddenly tacked hard to port, crossing across her opponent's bow as her naval crew rushed to their guns. Gun captains calmly strolled from gun to gun, firing each gun as it bore on the bow of the pirate ship. The guns were loaded with a double charge of grapeshot, and every shot went straight down the length of the pirate ship. El Diablo's vessel shuddered from stem to stem as the Spaniard's deadly discharge smashed into his crew, stacking the dead and dying in stacks. Blood sluiced over the deck and ran out her gunports and down her sides.

El Diablo tried to turn his ship to answer, but he was too used to dealing with merchant ships with their tiny crews and slow, bulky vessels rather than competently handled warships, and he had just made a fatal error. His ship shuddered and his sails flapped as he lost all headway. He ordered his port broadside fired, but he had lost too many men. Few of the shots hit the Santa Maria, which was able to continue her turn and come in across the pirate ship's unprotected stern. A second murderous broadside swept the length of the pirate ship, causing great damage and even more casualties aboard the pirate ship.

"Break off and run," El Diablo roared, but his face was grim as he faced the possibility of being called to account for his crimes. His paramour was made of sterner stuff, and she screamed defiance at the Spanish ship, which was maneuvering for a third broadside. A great cheer went up from the Spaniard crew as the broadside blew large chunks of the pirate deck into the air, buckling many of his gunports, and bringing down one of his lateen sails.

But El Diablo was still not beaten, and the Spanish crew heard him bellowing orders above the roar of gunfire.

"He's not striking!" one of the Spanish officers shouted angrily.

"All right, Don Guillermo," called the galleon's captain. "Starboard again." Leaning slightly before the breeze, the magnificent ship ate up the distance between her and the running corsair and gave her on final, thunderous broadside before closing to grapple.

As the ropes with grappling hooks were thrown from the Santa Maria and the two vessels were pulled together, one tornado of round shot crashed through the planking of the pirate vessel, aimed downward at her waterline. Simultaneously, swivel guns along the rail, already loaded with grapeshot, fired, and gunners along the rail of El Diablo's ship were mangled into chunks of bloody flesh by the leaden bail. The helmsman went down in a soggy pool of blood, and less than half the crew remained alive to defend the ship as the soldiery aboard the Santa Maria poured over the rails and advanced with cutlass and bayonet.

El Diablo cursed and jumped to man the helm himself, hoping to tear his ship away from the grappling ropes. But another broadside ripped out from the Santa Maria even as he reached the wheel, again crashing into his ship at the waterline. The deck heaved, and El Diablo knew his ship was going down.

Screaming blasphemous insults at the Spanish, El Diablo and his hellcat mistress stood arm in arm on the canted quarterdeck of his sinking ship. They both were armed with cutlasses and waved them defiantly at the Spanish troops who were clambering back to the Santa Maria, cursing them for cowards, questioning their manhood, and challenging them to combat while they waited for death to claim them.

But neither El Diablo nor Carmen was lucky that day. The Spanish soldiers and sailors regained their own ship and cut the grappling lines. As his ship went down in a bubbling whirlpool of shattered timber and crimson froth, most of her crew went down with her. But among the few pulled alive from the water and clapped in chains were El Diablo and his mistress. The Spanish raised a cheer at seeing the captured pair, relishing the thought of the justice that would be meted out to them.

The Santa Maria returned to Cadiz on the southwestern coast of Spain, with the few captured pirates in irons below deck. El Diablo and his paramour, along with the other survivors, were forced into a jail cart at the point of bayonets. The carts had bars from the floor to the ceiling, which afforded the populace the chance to look on the famous pirate and his slightly less famous mistress as they were taken to the fortress overlooking the harbor and immediately taken down to the dungeons.

The prison jailer and several Inquisitors along with a dozen guards were waiting for them in the dungeon along with the captain of the Santa Maria and the local governor. Despite the fact that the Inquisition had drastically declined in influence during the Renaissance, the torture chamber in Cadiz was still in good working order. The wood of the Rack was smooth and polished, with the sheen of the frequent application of oil that kept the wood fresh. The chains looped over pulleys secured to the ceilings were clean, oiled, and free of rust. The leather manacles on so many torture engines had been carefully tended and were fresh and pliable, able to buckle smoothly about wrist and ankle of an accused heretic or witch as she was stretched on the Rack or hung in mid-air by reversed arms in the Strappado.

"Ah!" exclaimed the governor, stepping forward in front of the chained prisoners. "The famous El Diablo finally comes to call!" His eyes moved to the fiery Carmen standing defiantly beside him. "And his equally famous paramour! We have been awaiting you, and everything has been prepared."

His voice lowered, and he hissed, "We have a few questions we want to ask of you, and we want answers. I have charged these fine experts..." He waved his hands at the Interrogators, who inclined their heads before he continued, ". . . to convince you to answer them. It would go easier with you if you talk - you're already condemned to death for piracy, but it could take you a very long time to actually be executed."

He shrugged and continued, "And, if you tell us what we wish to know, you'll go to the gallows. Refuse, and we'll get the information anyway, and you won't receive the mercy of the gallows. You'll be broken to the Wheel and left to the mercy of the carrion eaters!"

This threat had an electrifying effect on several of the few surviving pirates, but El Diablo just turned his head away while Carmen just laughed and spat at the governor.

It was merely a part of the personality of El Diablo that he reacted as he did. He had lived a life of violence and had always expected to die the same way. The threat the governor made left him unmoved. How was dying on the Wheel, bones broken and threaded through the spokes, any different that dying slowly from a musket ball in the guts?

But Carmen's defiance sprang from a different well: Hatred. The pure, soul-deep emotion that made revolutionaries dare any danger in trying to claw down the hated aristos that kept them and their kind in soul-killing poverty and want. That made young wives in their twenties look as if they were in their forties and claimed almost half of all children, often killing the mother in childbirth. That made parents starve themselves in their desperation to give their children enough to eat to stave off death.

So she felt as her paramour did, though she was not familiar with the Wheel that the governor mentioned. Such executions occurred in the large cities, and she had grown up on the estate of the Marqués de Santa Flora before being selected to be the personal maid of his daughter by his wife, the Marquesa. It had seemed a wonderful life to Carmen at first, who was only twelve years old when chosen, the same age as her mistress, Maria. But hatred had grown in her heart over the years since instead of love, for she had seen for firsthand the utter disdain of the nobility for the sufferings of their peasantry. What did they how many children of the peasantry died? They could always have more! And why should they care if those children who lived cried themselves to sleep as their almost empty stomachs growled, trying to digest the almost valueless soup that had been their only supper? She dreamed nightly of being able to plunge a dagger into the back of her mistress and then steal into the sleeping chambers of the Marques and the Marquesa to slit their throats as they slept. But she had known that her dreams were merely dreams, and so she ruthlessly shoved such desires out of her mind . . . or she tried to. But she was intelligent enough to know that showing any part of her own growing hatred would likely result in being flogged before being sold to a brothel. So she had concealed it . . . until the caravel returning them to Spain had been taken by her savior, El Diablo!

Then she had been free to give her hatred free rein, and she had the utter joy of watching her hated mistress die so very terribly over the fire while she, Carmen, had watched her die sitting with her lover and his pirates. She had gloried in imagining the agony the aristocratic must be experiencing as the heat seared her pampered skin and sank deep into her body. Afterward, she had been further privileged to actually be able to dine on the succulent flesh of the horribly dead Maria. She only wished it had been possible to have the hated Marques and Marquesa present to witness the entire, divine episode as their only daughter was stripped absolutely naked so her every feminine charm was blatantly exposed to the debased audience. Then they would have continued to watch in horror as their precious Maria was tied tightly to her spit and then put over the fire to scream her life away as she was roasted alive. That would have been the final and absolute epitome of her wonderful revenge, but what she had actually accomplished was enough. Actually, more than enough, for she had never even dared to dream of actually be able to revenge herself on her oppressors.

And now, she was being called to account by the side of her beloved El Diablo. Why should she care about being called to judgment by the hated aristocratic tyrants?

Whatever they did to her, she had already fulfilled desires much deeper than those she had dreamed of. What further could she have wished? The answer was nothing, so now she shook her head defiantly at her captors, making her dark hair fly about, and spat again at the governor.

She missed, but the governor merely smiled. He waved at her, speaking over his shoulder to the Inquisitors. "Start with the harlot. Once you've broken her, her paramour may be more willing to tell us what he knows."

He turned to the captain of the Santa Maria and said, "Shall we repair upstairs and sample what I'm assured is a very passable Reserva. Or would you prefer to stay and watch?" The captain of the Santa Maria gave the governor a bow. "Your pardon, Excellency, but the Marques is a long-time friend. It would give me pleasure to remain below and witness your Inquisitors visit true justice to the harlot who betrayed her mistress so foully."

"I was not aware of the relationship, captain," smiled the governor. "If the Marques was a friend of mine, I would assuredly feel exactly as you do. Enjoy yourself!"

After the heavy door closed behind him, the head inquisitor ordered, "Chain the rest of the scoundrels to the wall so they can watch. Then strip the harlot. We'll see how she enjoys the Strappado first, along with the judicious use of hot irons on her more sensitive parts. If she still remains stubborn, why then we'll move to harsher methods. Much harsher." He smiled cruelly at the defiant Carmen as the guards moved toward the prisoners.

El Diablo gave a roar of outrage and leapt at the approaching guards, trying to swing the chains between his wrists as a weapon. But the chain was too short, and the guards knew well how to avoid such an obvious attack. It took four of them to control the struggling giant, but his neck was soon locked in a circlet of iron with a solid chain to the wall and both ankles were similarly secured. The rest of the pirates gave less trouble, and the guards soon returned to assist the two Inquisitors, who were easily avoiding the hissing and clawing struggles of his consort.

The inquisitors were well used to resisting prisoners, even in these more enlightened days, and they needed no help, now that El Diablo was secured. They soon had Carmen's looted finery stripped from her, leaving her lush, dark-haired nakedness exposed to the dank breeze that wafted through the chamber. Her arms were freed from the manacles and roughly pulled behind her so the leather manacles attached to a chain hanging from the ceiling could be buckled around her wrists.

As chain was pulled upward, Carmen grimaced as the rising chain pulled her arms up behind her, forcing her to bend over. But her wrists continued to rise, and soon she could bend no more. But the Inquisitor at the crank against the wall continued his work, pulling the naked girl to the very tips of her toes.

A moment later, she lost even the support of her toes as she was pulled fully into the air, her shoulders blazed with pain from being so unnaturally twisted. The captain of the Santa Maria looked on the nude prisoner appreciatively, thinking that she was a lovely wench.

She looks like she belongs in my bed, smiling as I approach her, rather than facing the tender touches of these merciless interrogators and a bitter death, came the unbidden thought from the captain's sensual side, only to be replaced by his better sense. Better to take a crocodile to my bed than that merciless cutthroat! If she was ready and willing to cook - and eat! - her mistress, what else would she do? Slit my throat, at the very least! And probably worse! No, she belongs where she is, and nothing they can do to her is more than is her just desserts!

Carmen indeed received her just desserts, as the Inquisitors began their work. They started by removing the chains at her feet, tying her trim ankles together, and adding twenty pounds of weight to each big toe, drawing a groan from the suspended nude. Her groan changed to a scream as she was suddenly dropped a foot toward the floor, and she danced in mid-air as white-hot fire blossomed in her shoulders and in the joints of her big toes.

But, though strangled sounds of pain escaped her compressed lips, she refused to scream as this variant of the Strappado, called the Squassation, was repeated, with the heights from which she was dropped being increase. She did cry out despite herself as her toes were dislocated, nor later as one shoulder came loose with a nauseating "choonk!" Ripping pains surged throughout her torso, but she gritted her teeth and compressed her lips harder as the drop was repeated until her other shoulder was also ripped from its socket.

With both shoulders dislocated, her arms went straight upward past her head as she twisted slowly in midair, and the Inquisitors removed the weight at her ankles, securing her ankles to rings embedded in the stone floor. Then they brought out the brazier full of glowing coals, with its full quota of instruments meant to apply unbearable heat to the helpless flesh of those being interrogated. This at last ripped a scream from the tortured brigand, for not even woman as eaten with hatred as Carmen can stoically withstand the touch of hot metal to her bare flesh.

Having drawn their first scream from the recalcitrant prisoner, the Inquisitors were quick to continue the same torment. Carmen began to scream louder as the irons began to touch her everywhere that was sensitive - on her bare breasts, her sweat-covered thighs and calves, her deliciously bouncing buttocks, her sensitive, sexy armpits, and up and down the line of her slender back. Glowing metal sought out the bottom of the deep depression of her navel and explored the cleft between her buttocks without securing any information from Carmen regarding other pirate anchorages and rendezvous, the location where much of their captured treasure had been hidden, and what other and types of ships were being used in the buccaneer depredations. She knew many of these things, for El Diablo had confided much to her, but, though she screamed, she would not divulge what she knew.

So her torture continued and was changed to other engines of torment. Her shoulders were set back into their sockets, only to be pulled out again on the Rack, along with her hips, elbows, and knees. Flaming splinters were shoved under her fingernails before each nail, along with her toenails, were extracted by pliers. Her feet were crushed as wedges were driven into the dreaded Boot. She was sat astride the Spanish Horse while red-hot needles were thrust through her breasts and buttocks as well as her arms and legs. The hot pincers tore her flesh brutally, and her thumbs and nipples were crushed by the jaws of the thumbscrews.

The Spanish guards enjoyed the spectacle, howling with laughter at her screams as they suggested other, usually vulgar, treatments that might be applied to her, though the captain of the Santa Maria had seen enough and departed upstairs. Finally, in disgust, the Inquisitors sat Carmen on the Judas Cradle and turned their attention to her lover.

If the governor had thought the giant brigand would be weakened by seeing the torture and mutilation of his lover, he didn't know his man. Instead of being weakened, he was made stronger by seeing her endure her torture without divulging what she knew. After seeing such a display of intransigence, how could he do less? So, after two further days of torture, in which El Diablo was forced to bellow his agony, just as his paramour had done, he told his questioners no more than she did. So they had no choice but to rather shamefacedly climb the stairs and report their failure to the governor.

The governor, however, did not react as they told him of the lack of success from their best efforts. He only shrugged and said, "If you can't, you can't. I'm pleased that you stopped before they died or were totally destroyed. I want to give the populace at least a little amusement. At the very least, the wounds they bear will show what you've tried, and we don't have to tell everyone they didn't talk. But cut out their tongues before we send them to the Wheel in the morning. That way, they can't betray anything embarrassing."

So, the next morning, both El Diablo and Carmen were dragged up from the dungeon into the blinding sunlight and transported from the castle to the central square of Cadiz. Little remained of Carmen's former lush beauty except her face, which was untouched. Onlookers marveled at the many wounds on the bodies of both pirates, who remained as naked as they had in the dungeon. But many remarks were made about the lines of suffering graven on the faces of both villains.

Then, to the delight of the city's populace, both wounded pirates, neither of whom could walk, were carried to two large wheels inclined at forty-five degree angles on an upraised stage that gave a splendid view to the audience. With both bound in place to the Wheels, the torture began, as the interrogators began to use their bone breakers, large, iron balls mounted on three-foot handles, to break each major bone in the bodies of the naked man and woman. The Interrogators alternated between the prisoners, breaking, for example, an arm of El Diablo before breaking the shin of Carmen.

The torture went on in an atmosphere of great enjoyment, for the depredations of El Diablo had been of considerable news and alarm to a port city like Cadiz, which derived its revenue from the sea. By and large, El Diablo remained mostly silent, though he grimaced as each bone was broken and sometimes gave a muffled grunt. Carmen was somewhat more demonstrative, which afforded a greater degree of pleasure to the townspeople, but even she mostly managed to mute her screams to strangled cries as she gritted her teeth and kept her dry and cracked lips pressed close. But she did give a few full-throated screams when large bones such as her thigh were broken, which were received with great glee by the onlookers.

When came the time for the two to be flayed alive, a nightmare of horror that rivaled even the prisoners' own bestial acts, a bit more amusement was forthcoming. El Diablo remained as stoic as before, only occasionally venting his pain, but Carmen had been pushed past her limits. Each time the executioners made an incision with their skinning knives around the patch to be skinned, Carmen began to scream. And when they actually peeled the skin from her broken body, she would shriek in mortal agony. She screamed even louder when the area was dusted with salt, which all in the audience, both men and women, thought was highly amusing.

Through the entire ordeal, both prisoners remained alive. An hour after her flayed carcass was hoisted aloft on a pole to make her more accessible to the ravens, Carmen was heard to scream in agony as one of the black carrion eaters pecked out one of her eyes her dark eyes. She screamed again as he did the same to the other.

But El Diablo lived up to his reputation. When one of the vultures tried to get at his eyes, he caught its head between his yellowed but still strong teeth. Slowly, as the great bird's wings beat against his raw and bloody face, the spectators gave either a shout of laughter or a gasp of horror, depending on their disposition, as El Diablo bit off the vulture's head and spat it into the crowd.