'Now those witches can get drunk to their bones,' Wu is supposed to have said, a strange comment with a meaning seeped in ironic retribution. 'Intoxicated unto the melting of the marrow' appears to have been a contemporary poetic term for an orgasm – Wu's chosen means of execution for her two bedchamber rivals was a brutally literal enactment of sexual ecstasy. The closest possible analogy in a modern English vernacular, deprived of such classical niceties, would be: 'Fuck them both to death.'
