Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  A rumbling sound clutched at their bodies in the water seconds before their ears heard it through the air.

  “Aulus!” the courier cried. He heaved himself up on the float as if the shock waves were in fact tentacles squeezing and releasing and ready to squeeze again.

  “It’s just a whale calling,” the agent said sharply. He had been momentarily frozen himself by the immersion in distant sound.

  “No,” said Calvus, his voice drifting with the breeze, “it was the ship. It just went down.”

  The cries could as well as not be those of gulls, wheeling against the stars in search of the white water that indicated fish shoaling. Indeed, the cries could be those of gulls even if the flesh that sparkled their thin commotion was not that of fish at all. The sound still told of men dying.

  Perennius had seen it happen off Alexandria harbor, a grain ship foundering within minutes of the help that would have saved at least the crew. The stern rose sharply, its great rudder flapping desperately for help. Then, swifter than a ship on the ways being launched, the vessel had plunged vertically. In its rush for the bottom, the ship sucked in and swept along the screaming crewmen who had flung themselves over the side at the last instant. Compartments crashed inward under the increasing pressure, belching up cargo and timbers and men, some of them still alive. The customs boat Perennius was aboard had saved three men and the ship’s cat. It was more than anyone among the rescuers had thought probable.

  The Eagle had died without even that hope. Might the merciful Sun take them to his bosom.

  “Back to work,” Perennius said aloud. “We’ve got a ways yet to go.”

  * * *

  It was hours later that they heard the other ship.

  Perhaps Calvus could have said just how many hours it had been. For the rest of them, the time since sunset had been a blur of fatigue punctuated with moments of terror or despair. They had been exhausted, physically and emotionally, when they entered the water. The sea’s chill and the difference it provided from what they had been doing before at least colored the first brief span of time on the float.

  The remainder of the experience was a white blotch as fatigue poisons leached away the attempts of minds to think along with the ability of muscles to move. When the castaways rested, they lay their heads on the pine grate and were drenched, eyes and noses and the mouths through which they tried to breathe, by seas. The salt water pulsed through the interstices of the grating. When they labored, they stretched at full length in that sea with only their hands on the wood to buoy them and remind them of the purpose for which they punished themselves.

  It was during a pause that they realized, more or less together, that the squealing sound was not the breath in their lungs or an artifact of fatigue in their ears. Someone was stroking a ship closer. There was even an undercurrent of voices chanting as they kept the long sweeps creaking forward in unison.

  “Herakles!” said Sestius in the tone of a man who watched an apotheosis. He tried to lift his torso onto the grating, but his arms would not support his weight. “Somebody’s found us.”

  “It’s a boat?” Gaius wheezed from behind the centurion.

  “Wait, dammit, keep your voices down,” Perennius insisted. For the first moment, he was speaking only from instincts of secretiveness burned into him during circumstances in which every human was an enemy. When his mind cleared enough for thought, however, his reaction was the same. He tilted his head, and tried to drain water out of his left ear canal by stretching it with a fingertip. That did not help clarity enough. “Calvus,” he called over the waves’ mild slapping, “can you tell who it is?”

  “They’re speaking German, Aulus Perennius,” the traveller replied. “I think it may be—”

  “Help us!” cried Gaius over the sound of oarlocks. “Help us for god’s sake!”

  The agent’s first motion was toward his side and the sword he was not wearing there. “Gaius!” he snarled across the bundled clothes. “Shut up or—”

  “Aulus, we’re going to drown!” the younger man screamed. Everyone has his own fear.… “Help us! Help us!”

  Perennius’ mind had already planned the killing. He would go under the float, not over it. He would seize Gaius by the knees, jerk his head under water, and shift his grip to the younger man’s throat to strangle him. But as the agent’s hands poised to drive him under the narrow grating, his intellect reasserted itself over the murderous reflexes which had been his life for so many years. He relaxed. The tempo of the sweeps had already slowed. Moments later the squealing stopped entirely. It was replaced by a louder rumble of voices which Perennius himself could now tell were speaking German.

  Blazes.

  “All right,” the agent said, loudly but in Latin. “Calvus is an envoy to Odenath, Bella’s his wife, the rest of us are high staff officers accompanying him. We’re worth money! And blazes! let me do the talking—understand?” As he spoke, Perennius was grubbing through folds of wet garments to reach the pouch containing the bullets he had not fired during the battle. He had forgotten to take the pouch off when he jumped into the sea, a lapse he would have called self-destructive madness if someone else had done the same thing. Now the agent opened the flap and spilled the leaden missiles out into the sea.

  He hoped the sling itself would pass in the darkness and confusion. At any rate, he was not ready to abandon it just yet. But high, ransom-worthy Roman officers were not likely to be found carrying pouches of sling bullets.

  The sweeps were creaking again, noticeably closer. Soon the castaways would be able to see their rescuers cresting a swell.

  If they were the people Perennius suspected they were, they would have a very clear memory of bullets from his sling.

  The ship, a darkness of sharp lines against the blur of the elements, loomed over the grating to starboard. It was almost close enough for Perennius to reach out and touch the nearest oar.

  “Christ protect us!” said Sabellia in a voice that held little hope of that protection. “They’re the ones we set afire and got away from.”

  And who else would have come upon us in these waters, thought the agent. He cried in German, “Wotan has blessed you, glorious warriors! Your arms will drip with gold from our ransom!”

  It might have worked. Perennius was still not surprised that the pirates clubbed him unconscious as they dragged him over the gunwale of their ship.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “You hit this one too hard,” a voice was saying. The words buzzed and threw purple after-images across the surface of Perennius’ mind.

  “No, he’s not dead,” another voice replied. They were both speaking in German, but the dialect differed from that which Perennius had learned in his youth. The vowels were shorter and flatter than those of the South Rhineland. “Besides, what does it matter? We should have thrown them all back into the sea. Except for the women.”

  There were sounds besides the men speaking nearby. There was an indistinct murmur, more voices at greater distance … the crackle of a fire … occasional clapping and hoots of triumph.

  There were also moans.

  The agent’s hands and arms were tied to a post behind his back. He opened his eyes a slit to watch through the hedge of lashes. The ship the Eagle had fought clear of that afternoon was now hauled up on a narrow beach. The cookfire close by laid gleams and shadows across the sun-bleached oak of the ship’s planking. The hull was clinker built. Each row of planks overlapped the row beneath it instead of butting smoothly edge to edge as was the normal method here in the South. It gave the pirate vessel a ridged, implacable appearance like that of a crocodile digesting a child on a mud bank.

  Across the fire from their ship, most of the pirates were gang-raping two women. The nearer of the victims was Sabellia.

  “Well, go ahead and cut his throat, then, Grim,” the first voice was saying. “Biarni! Isn’t that meat cooked yet?”

  Perennius opened his eyes and raised his head to the post from which he had
been sagging. He gave what was meant to be a smile of greeting. The agent’s legs sprawled out in front of him. He had to remember to kick with the left one, though the numbness in the right was less than he would have—“Warriors!” he said aloud in his Schwabian dialect. “Our ransom will make all of you ring-givers! And I will sacrifice to my own gods in thanks at being overcome by heroes so great!”

  “He’s awake, Anulf,” said the owner of the second voice. He looked uncertainly toward the other Goth who stood beside the bound agent.

  Perennius was tied to one of the posts of what had been a fenced garden. The pirates had slashed gaps in the wattle fencing to use the posts for immobilizing their prisoners. Gaius was struggling with his bonds eight feet to the agent’s left, and the huddled figure at the post beyond the courier was presumably Sestius. The farmhouse itself still burned sluggishly in the background. It must have been quite a display when its thatch blazed up. A moment’s thought would have given the pirates the building for shelter; but they obviously spent few enough moments on thought.

  Vicious little children, and nothing but a tottering Empire to keep the world from becoming their world.

  Grim, the Goth who had drawn a single-edged knife to finish the agent, had no left arm below the elbow. He wore a green tunic with embroidered sleeves. The tunic was of good quality, but that was no indicator of rank among pirates who had had the opportunity to pick their choice of looted clothing. The obvious leader of the band was the man the other had called Anulf, a great, brown-bearded hulk of a fellow with a livid bruise on his forehead.

  Perennius thought he recognized Anulf from the instant before their ships collided. The Gothic chieftain had been in the front rank then, wearing a gilded helmet crested with the image of a long-tusked boar. The pirate had gone down with a crash as an oar blade ended his fight before it began. He was not wearing the helmet now, nor the leather cuirass faced with large bronze disks which the agent remembered also from the battle. Anulf did carry his long sword, however, slung across his back from a baldric. The birds-head pommel waved over his shoulder like one of the Wotan’s ravens.

  Now Anulf looked at Perennius with the interest a shopper gives a carcass in the poulterer’s shop: checking the hind feet to be sure of buying rabbit and not cat. “You’re the leader of this lot?” the German asked. “The woman said you are.”

  “The woman?” Perennius repeated. Sabellia had broken? Of all of them, the agent would have guessed she would hold out the longest.…

  But as Perennius turned his head to the right, a swarthy Herulian rose to his feet crying, “Five!” The German still wore a tunic of iron-buckled deerskin. It flapped back down over his thighs as he stood up. Two friends pounded his back in triumph. One of them was jiggling ale or looted wine from the jeweled cup he offered.

  Sabellia’s wrists were tied to another post. Early on, two of the cheering pirates had probably held the woman’s ankles outstretched also. That was no longer necessary. Sabellia’s face lolled toward the agent. The eyes were open with fully-dilated pupils, but there was no mind behind them. Her mouth was drooling. The pirates had carried out their business with no more than the requisite brutality. The bloody lip might very well have been self-inflicted. The scratches on Sabellia’s breasts and flat rib-cage were the results of individual warriors’ teeth and harness, not deliberate whipping. Even the bruises already starting to appear were most likely the result of enthusiasm and the rocky soil.

  Only once before had Perennius seen eyes that looked as Sabellia’s did now. He had been with the detachment which crucified a slave who had murdered his master. At the last, the victim no longer had the strength to stand on the spike which had been driven through the instep of his feet, pinning them to the base of the cross. The man’s knees sagged, drawing his wrists down against the nails that held them to the crossbar. In that position, the diaphragm could not inflate the lungs against the full weight of the torso pressing down on it. The eyes of that slave, beyond pain and fear of the suffocation which would kill him in a few minutes, were as empty as Sabellia’s.

  A huge, blond Goth wearing a mail shirt but no trousers lowered himself onto Sabellia. He was accompanied by the encouragement of several of his fellows. The attempt to equal the Herulian’s feat looked doomed to limp failure, especially since the victim’s labiae were swollen from the bruising.

  “Yeah, the funny bald one,” Anulf was saying. “I took her first myself. None of the others would have dared, but Anulf fears nothing!”

  “Dare?” shouted the Herulian with the chalice. It spilled as he turned. He pointed at the Gothic chieftain’s face. “What do you know about daring when you lie on your back all the fight?”

  The wrists of the figure beyond Sabellia were tied to a post just as the Gallic woman’s were. Perennius stared beyond the frustrated mumbling of the would-be rapist and the mewling woman beneath him. There was no one astride the second victim at the moment. She squirmed into a sitting position against the post. The motion implied either double-jointed shouders or more slack than was to be expected in the straps that held her. She looked back at the agent. Her face was at first void. Then it quirked with the tiny smile that had become an expression increasingly common with her.

  Perennius knew why “Lucius Cloelius Calvus” had always worn at least a tunic while in company. Of course the agent had never thought that “Calvus” was a real name.

  The fire crackling beneath the pig halved lengthwise gave Anulf’s beard a redder cast as he turned to the interruption. The Herulian had paused to take a slurping drink from his cup. No one else seemed to be paying much attention.

  Calvus’ chest was as flat as a man’s, flatter than the agent’s because Perennius’ chest muscles bulged even at rest. Calvus’ pectorals lay in sheets that belied their demonstrated strength. Her nipples were small and pale, even though the firelight emphasized contrasts. Her body for as far as Perennius could see was as hairless as her head. Presumably Calvus’ genitals had determined her sex even to Germans who were taken aback by her appearance.

  The story that Perennius had sketched out, that Calvus was an envoy and the rest of them were on “his” staff, had become absurd at the moment the pirates tore off the traveller’s tunic. Well, the agent would come up with another story.

  Even now, the most feminine thing about Calvus was the lack of a prominent Adam’s apple in her slim throat. Perennius found it hard to believe that he had overlooked that feature for so long, but—a bald woman six feet four inches tall?

  Anulf wore wooden-soled boots. They were cross-strapped up his calves. He flicked his head to the left, drawing the Herulian’s eyes toward the cooking fire. Then Anulf kicked out fiercely, planting the sole of his right boot in the Herulian’s groin.

  The Goth’s victim doubled up, spewing wine from his mouth and nostrils. Anulf was not finished. He snatched the knife from his one-armed companion. The Herulian had sunk to his knees wheezing and vomiting. Anulf stabbed him behind the shoulder blade, a pounding blow which he followed with a second. At the third stab, the Herulian who had just finished with Sabellia tried to grab the Goth’s wrist. Anulf threw him back, but the hilt of the knife remained protruding from the wound this time.

  The murder had made surprisingly little noise, but now every German Perennius could see was standing. Men were appearing from the darkness. There were not as many of them as the agent had feared; only a score or so out of an original complement of over a hundred. Some of the able-bodied pirates must have boarded the second ship and gone to the bottom with it. None of the men Perennius saw had serious wounds. The pirates’ own casualties must have gone over the side with no more ceremony than so much spoiled fruit.

  Anulf glared around his assembled band. “When I need advice on courage from a Herulian donkey-fucker,” he roared, “I’ll ask for it!”

  The body of Anulf’s victim was shuddering. The knife hilt danced in the firelight. The Herulian who had tried to intervene in the killing had stepped back. Hi
s own short sword was half drawn. The blond Goth who had taken his place on Sabellia now grabbed the Herulian’s elbows from behind. Another Goth cuffed the Herulian hard enough that his knees sagged.

  The Herulians had been a small minority of the band, just enough to provide the Goths with seamen to work their ships. The fighting, due in part to the agent’s sling and marksmanship, had accounted for most of those. It was quite obvious to Perennius from the appearance and attitude of the pirates he saw that there were only three Herulians left in the band: two of them standing, surrounded by Goths, and the third on the ground twitching out his last few seconds of life.

  With deliberation, a Goth wearing brass bracelets coiled the length of both forearms stepped forward. He planted a spear in the chest of the Herulian who had grappled with Anulf. The victim jerked backward. The Goth holding him from behind cursed as the point pricked him through the Herulian’s body.

  The last surviving Herulian had been edging away from the trouble. He was not wearing a weapon. When the spearhead thudded through his companion’s jerkin, he turned to run. He tripped on Sabellia’s outstretched legs and sprawled on the ground between the two women. Anulf himself stepped forward. He pinned the Herulian with the point of his long sword before the man could rise. The dying man’s body arched like that of a fish on the gaff. He screamed, but the sound disintegrated into bubbling as Anulf leaned more weight onto his weapon. When the chieftain withdrew the sword with a sudden jerk, the Herulian was silent. Eight inches of the blade were stained with arterial blood as bright as the fire that illuminated it.

  “Should’ve done this weeks ago,” Anulf muttered. He wiped at the bloody sword with the edge of his tunic. “Bastards wouldn’t have run us right into those oars if I had.”

  Aulus Perennius had been in too many fights to concentrate on any one thing when his death might be in the hands of the man on the other side. But even while he watched men seizing weapons and tensing for murder, the agent kept one eye on Calvus. He recognized the traveller’s fixed expression in the moments while Goths were deciding whether or not to let the incident pass. And Perennius recognized the expression that followed on Calvus’ face, when Anulf’s sword crunched free of the Herulian’s ribs. That second expression perfectly reflected the joy Perennius himself felt at watching the German die between the rape victims.