Seacage — Lolah Burford

Suddenly he knew where he was. He was in the cage. He was out in the sea, on a pinnacle of rock, and he was in the cage. His spirit screamed once, in sidlen agony, and then was quiet. My God. It was the end.

Seacage is a tempestuous tale of savagery and lust, of revenge and repentance. Lolah Burford takes us back in time to the beginning of the Christian era where love and hate knew no boundaries. Where passions raged beyond the laws of man.

The Setting: A Mediteranean kingdom where a young king, deposed and blinded, is left to die in a bronze cage on a rocky isle in the salty sea. He knows not why he is imprisoned. He remembers little except having been brought there, thrust into the cage through fire, and left to rot. There is no food, no water, no shelter, no escape. It is a place of death.

Thoughts come to him from out of the past, from another time. He remembers, as a boy, seeing the cage at a great distance, its large body swaying violently, a reminder of the brutaltiy of man. He was told it was death to go near, not death by law but that the waters near the rock jutting from the sea were dangerous, full of eddies and whirlpools and changed direction without warning and sucked boats and men down into their depths, never to be returned. Some said the cage was given by the gods themselves, for the punishment of fallen kings. The facts were not known, only guessed at.

He wept at his fate. So harsh a sentence passed on one so young and untried in life. Yet, suddenly, the course of his life changes. Three voices speak to him: his conscience, his God, and the woman Anita. Is she the agent of his destruction or his only hope of salvation?

Rape, murder, and unspeakable tortures mount to a shattering climax as the two lovers triumph over the bronze seacage. Together they live and love passionately. Theirs is a story for all time