by David Drake
“Biarni!” Anulf said as he turned from the body. He reached over his back with both hands to guide his sword into its sheath. His fingers were trembling. “Cut me some goddam meat! And where’s the wine?”
The agent exchanged glances with Calvus. Between them, Sabellia had begun to snore heavily. The pirates were settling down to a meal of wine and pork. The meat was half-charred and half-raw from the look of the slabs. Perennius would have time to come up with a story before anyone got around to questioning him again. And he would have time to come up with a plan to escape from these Goths, as well. After he had murdered every one of them.
Perennius looked at Sabellia. Every one. He was very sure of that.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
What irritated Perennius as much as anything the next morning was the pirates’ vulnerability. The band was as disorganized as it was weak. The Germans had posted no guards. It would have taken more than a brief alarm to arouse most of them from the drunken stupor into which they had collapsed. If the burned-out householder had returned that night, he could have avenged his loss at no greater cost than an arm sore with throat-cutting.
But oh! the terrible Germans. Families for miles in every direction had probably run for the hills, tossing their money and plate down the well so as not to risk the time to bury it. The twenty pirates who had survived their brush with the Eagle had panicked the district as thoroughly as their original numbers could have done. Or for that matter, as thoroughly as the thousands of whom these were probably believed to be the outriders.
Well, there might be thousands more coming. That didn’t mean you ran.
It was some hours after the Goths had begun stumbling around again that any of them took notice of their prisoners. Perennius had shivered uncontrollably during the whole night. That was the reaction not only to being stripped and exposed to the cold, wet air but also to the exhaustion of his long bout of kicking the float forward. They must have been very close to shore when Gaius brought the pirates down on them.…
“All praise the unconquered sun,” Gaius murmured to the ball that had now climbed over the treetops to the east of them.
In Latin, Perennius said to the younger man, “The story has changed. I’m chief and we’re envoys to the Gothic kings of the Bosphorus. Gallienus is offering eight gold talents to the Goths if they’ll raid the Aegean coasts to soften them up for his own attack on Odenath next year.”
Gaius blinked. “What?”
The agent gave a disdainful shrug. “They’ll believe it. For that matter, I don’t know but what I’d believe it if the right man told me. The things that pass for diplomacy in this world aren’t always the things they explain in staff training.” Pitching his voice a little louder he added, “Sestius. Did you hear?”
Several pirates were returning from a foray into the woods. They were hallooing to their companions. The landing site was a cup out of the Taurus range which fringed the coast. It was an ideal place to beach a few ships in a fair degree of isolation. Off and on for millennia, the little bay had been a base for pirates. One of the ironies of the present situation was that the pirates now were outsiders instead of native Cilicians as generally in the past. The bawl of a frightened, angry cow gave evidence of at least part of the foragers’ loot.
Sestius had been slumped against his post ever since the agent had awakened from his own knock on the head the night before. Now the centurion turned. He moved with a difficulty which did not appear to be primarily physical. Between him and Perennius, Gaius straightened so as not to block the view. It was not the agent to whom Sestius’ attention was directed, however. “Bella,” Sestius called desperately. “Are you all right?”
“Sestius, did you hear me?” the agent demanded. All the Goths were moving around now, and at least a few of them were bound to take an interest in what their captives were discussing.
“Bella!”
The Gallic woman still lay supine. Perennius could see that her eyes were open. From where the centurion sat, she might have been dead. At that, the woman lay as still as death save for the slow, controlled movements of her chest. She could not shift a great deal because of the way her wrists were tied above her head. Even so there was an eerie quality to her stillness. The blood had dried her scratches into a black webbing. The depth of the bruises on her thighs and torso was particularly shocking because her skin was dark enough naturally to hide much of the damage. Sabellia slowly turned her head in the direction of her male companions. Her eyes showed them that the worst damage of the previous night had not been physical at all. “I’m all right,” the woman said. Her voice made a lie of the words, but there was no weakness in it.
Three Goths and a heifer burst out of the woods. “Biarni, get your goddam pot boiling,” one of the foragers called. “I don’t want my meat burned again today!”
Perennius wondered where the pirates had found the heifer. There was not enough land cleared in the immediate vicinity to pasture a cow. The household had kept pigs and chickens which foraged for themselves in the woods. The beasts had been turned loose when the pirates arrived, but the reek of hog manure was unmistakable. Aside from the kitchen garden to whose fence the prisoners were tied, there was no sign of cultivation around the little bay.
The Gothic chief noticed his captives. He walked toward them from the ship where he had been arguing with some of his men. The three Herulians lay where they had fallen. Their skins were turning gray. The muscles of the one between the women had tightened, drawing the corpse up into a fetal ball. From the look Anulf gave them, Perennius suspected the Goth was regretting some of his haste the night before.
“Greetings to you, King Anulf,” the agent called. He did not know what rank the Goth’s fellows would have granted him, but neither had he met a German who did not think of himself as a king somewhere in his secret heart. They were a people who prided themselves on freedom, which appeared on examination to amount to the right to lord over everyone else in the vicinity. “The gold-giving Emperor Gallienus sent me to you, his equal, and to your fellows, asking for alliance.” Noting that Anulf’s face still held an expression of glum concern, the agent added, “Also, my friends and I know something about sailing ships.” There was little enough truth to that statement, but it was a useful one. At that, they probably knew as much as any of the Goths themselves.
Anulf raised an eyebrow, but the discussion was interrupted by a startled bawl. One of the foragers had driven his spear deep enough to bury the socket over the heifer’s shoulder. She kicked out with her forelegs, then her hind legs, and spun in a circle that tore the spear-shaft out of the Goth’s hands. He and his fellows shouted and jumped away, dodging the cow. The heavy shaft whipped in ten-foot arcs as it projected from the cow’s side. The heifer seemed to have made up its mind to charge into the sea when it collapsed, spraying blood from its nostrils. Several pirates leaped toward the carcass with their knives out.
Anulf’s attention returned from the interruption to his captives. Perennius was about to resume his spiel. As his mouth opened, Sabellia forestalled him by saying in Border German no worse than the agent’s own, “Cut me loose for an hour and I’ll fix you a meal as fine as the ones I prepared for the Emperor before he sent me as a gift to the Kings of the Goths.”
The chieftain looked at her, then looked away without particular interest. The concept of women as human beings was as foreign to most Germans as it had been to Greeks in their Golden Age. “Gallienus could have waited,” the Goth boasted to Perennius. “Anulf will come and see him in Rome one of these days.”
“If you want to eat real food and fast, you’ll have me fix it for you,” the Gallic woman called. Both Anulf and the agent frowned in irritation. Sabellia was not speaking to them, however. The trio of foragers were looking approvingly at her. Sabellia lay on her back smiling. Her left leg was straight, her right knee cocked slightly. Perennius had been sure that the woman would draw both knees up to her chest and lie huddled on her side as soon as she was
alert enough to feel German eyes on her. Obviously, Sabellia was already alert in ways that the agent did not wholly fathom.
Biarni, the pirates’ cook, was a grizzled man who would have been short even without hunching over his withered hips. Perennius suspected the handicap was the result of an injury. A birth defect of that sort would have resulted in the infant being exposed on the kitchen midden for dogs to eat. Injured adults did not stand a great deal more of a chance among the free peoples of the North—the way the pirates had disposed of their wounded comrades, some of whom could have survived, was an example of that. But there were a few exceptions, like Biarni; and Biarni was no less jealous of his prerogatives for the fact that his fellows held him in obvious contempt.
Now the cook paused halfway to the cow. He was holding out the long knife with which he proposed to cut the beast’s throat. “Hey!” he said angrily to the foragers. “I’m the cook here. Don’t you listen to that—why, I’ll shut the dog-turd up myself!” He stumped purposefully toward Sabellia with a wave of his knife.
One of the foraging Goths stuck the butt of his spear between the cook’s crippled legs. Biarni flopped forward with a squawk. His knife flew out of his hand and bounced harmlessly from Anulf’s trousered calf. Almost the whole band of pirates laughed at the cripple’s discomfiture. The exception was Anulf. The chief kicked the fallen man furiously, shouting curses and following as his victim babbled and tried to roll away from the boots.
The Goth who had speared the heifer now slid the haft of an axe from his studded belt. The weapon was of moderate size, but it had double bitts and the look of hard use to it. The pirate sauntered over to Sabellia, raising his weapon casually.
Perennius tensed. He would have to use his left foot and kick over his injured right leg. If he could catch the Goth at the back of the knee, the man might fall backwards and—and get up to kill them all, but—
“All right, we’ll see what kind of cook you make,” the Goth said. As the agent relaxed, the axe chopped the thong against the post to which it was anchored. The pirate pumped his axehead loose while Sabellia rolled off her buttocks to her feet. Her smile had changed to something very different when the Goth who freed her looked away.
“Frigg’s balls, you scut!” Anulf roared as he saw what was happening behind him. “Who told you to let the bitch loose, Theudas?”
The other Goth had been wiping wood fibers from the nicks in the edge before he put his axe up. Now, gripping his weapon just below the head, he wheeled and demanded, “Who died and made you god, Anulf? I guess you’d let us all starve, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” snarled another of the men who had brought back the heifer. He strode toward the chief from the other side. “Just what have you done besides get most of us killed on this raid?”
Anulf’s one-armed companion was reaching furtively for a spear at the moment tension broke. Biarni had gotten up when Anulf’s attention turned from him. The cook, trying to creep away while he still watched his chief, had immediately fallen again into the coals of last night’s fire. His squeals of pain and terror brought another surge of laughter from the remaining Germans. Their anger melted at the hilarious spectacle of a cripple dancing in a cloud of ashes.
“Here,” Sabellia said. She stepped to Theudas with her wrists, still bound, upraised. The Goth sawed through the knot with his axe. Theudas was nearly seven feet tall. He bent over Sabellia, concentrating on his awkward task like a tailor threading a fine needle. The picture of his care was frighteningly at variance with the agent’s memory of the night before, the huge blond figure kneeling to rape the woman for the fifth time.
Anulf’s companion tried to hand him the spear. The chieftain looked around to see why he was being prodded. The anger that had been directed first at the cook, then at Theudas, now flared up at the one-armed man. Anulf slapped the spear away with a curse. Then he aimed a kick which Grim dodged with the ease born of experience.
Sabellia was draping herself with a cloak of lustrous brown wool appropriated from another of the pirates. It hung down to her knees. The throat, meant for the neck of a big man, hung from her shoulders. She had pinned it up with the hems overlapping. Perennius noted that the woman, despite her present kittenishness, had not brushed at the grit and leaves clinging to her skin when she stood. “One of you take the loin out of that cow,” she called.
A pirate immediately roared, “Biarni! Get out and get busy or I’ll kick your useless butt back to the Bosphorus!”
With most of the Gothic pirates following her, Sabellia stepped into the kitchen garden. “All right, pick some of that,” she began. “That’s thyme and we’ll need it. Now let’s see, is there any mint?”
Perennius twisted around his fencepost to watch the woman and her entourage. He was certain that it was all a ruse. As soon as Sabellia got her hands on a knife, she would stab as many of the startled Goths as her fury could reach. The agent recognized the look he had seen in her eyes. Murder was a reasonable desire, but Sabellia would be cut down before she got more than one or two of her rapists. Worse, her action would eliminate any chance Perennius himself had of release.
Anulf was watching his men with a look as sour as the thoughts Perennius hid behind a bland expression. Calvus, smooth as an ivory finial, sat in her pose of rigid concentration. The agent could not imagine what the bound woman was trying to accomplish. He hoped that it might be an attempt to keep Sabellia from some suicidal gesture.
Though he knew it was dangerous, the agent said, “King Anulf, if you will release me, I can better discuss my Emperor’s offer of gold to your Highness.” If Perennius’s hands weren’t free when the woman cut loose, all of them and the mission were well and truly screwed.
“Hel take you!” Anulf snarled. He stalked off to the ship and the wine still aboard it. Behind him skipped the one-armed man.
After that, the agent had nothing better to do than to watch Sabellia act.
Surely it was an act … but gods! it was a good one. And Perennius did not really know her that well, just assumed—felt—her similarity to another Gallic woman of years before.
Well, he hadn’t known Julia that well either, as it turned out.
“Eggs!” Sabellia called, snapping a finger against her palm. “Come on, fellows, they kept chickens so there has to be eggs.”
“Hoy!” called a Goth. He lifted a largish brown egg from within a bush which he had parted.
“Right, look for nests,” the woman encouraged. “We need, oh, one apiece. You’re a such big men.” Reaching under her cloak, flashing and then hiding her body in a fashion more enticing than her battered nudity of minutes before, Sabellia squeezed the biceps of the men to either side of her. One of them was the towering Theudas, the other his companion who had held a Herulian from behind for slaughter. “Now, where’s the fennel? In all this garden, there must be some fennel.”
The entourage made an absurd progress of the whole garden. Burly pirates, the Eagle’s murderous opponents less than a day before, paced beside the short woman. They held eggs, sprigs of herbs, and vegetables. Sestius was sunk in somnolent gloom. Gaius sat bolt upright. His face held a fixed expression while he tried to wear through his bonds by tiny movements against the rough surface of the post.
“Onions, now. No, those are leeks—well, bring them anyway, sure, but there ought to be—there, by the fence, that’s right.”
Perennius had already determined to his satisfaction that he could lift his post out of the ground if he needed to. The sunken part had rotted enough to permit that. Once the post was out of the way, he could slip his bound wrists under his body. That would be more painful than he cared to think about, what with the spear hole in his thigh, but it was possible too. He did not waste effort on bonds that could not be abraded in useful time anyway. And he did not slip into the black despair that was always useless. Besides, she wasn’t Perennius’ woman, not this one, not even the other when it came down to cases.… Perennius watched, making the basic assumpt
ion that there was something to see besides a woman selling herself to the gang that had already raped her in concert for the right to pick and choose her partners the next time.
And even if it were that, sooner or later there would be an opening for Aulus Perennius to act.
“Ah, wild horseradish,” Sabellia said. She pointed toward a juniper outside the cleared area. In the juniper’s shade grew a moderate-sized plant topped by a spray of hooded yellow flowers. “That one,” she directed, “the pretty yellow one. But only bring the root, it’ll lie just beneath the surface.”
A Goth sprang to obey. He drew his dagger for a makeshift trowel.
“And now, boys…” the Gallic woman went on. She paused to squeeze again the arms of her nearest consorts, both of them laden with greens. “Now, the beef!”
The band roared with enthusiasm. It began to tramp toward the bloody carcass.
The agent had not been as hungry as the labor he had done since he last ate would have justified. That was due in part to the chill, first of the sea and then of the night on his damp body. Nausea from the rap on the head had contributed also. The pirates had really not cared whether the folk they dragged from the water lived or died. Perennius suspected that Calvus, still locked in his—her!—trance state had something to do with the fact that the others had not been clubbed as hard as was Perennius himself. They could not have been. At least one would have died of a crushed skull by now if they had all been treated as the agent was.
Sight of the dripping loin brought Perennius’ appetite back with a rush, however, though his taste ran more to seafood than to beef when there was an option. Biarni had hacked the muscle out with unexpected skill. Cooking among the barbarians tended to be a process of boiling gobbets of flesh. The originals could be cows, pigs, sheep—or horses, if you happened to be with a raiding party on the eastern steppes. When haste required something different, like grilling, the results was apt to be the sort of disaster the pirates had faced—and had gorged on nevertheless—the night before. The crippled cook had shown despite that a familiarity with the heifer’s anatomy. He had even gone beyond his instructions and had skewered the loin on an iron rod from the ship’s furniture.