Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  That, Perennius thought, was the measure of the disaster which had struck the pirates. A cripple was being burned alive, and not one of the Germans around him was laughing.

  Theudas backed away from his band. His big hands were clenching as if he hoped in an instant to grapple with the cause of the catastrophe. His boot rang on the fallen silver tray. The blond Goth looked down.

  “Now, Sabellia,” Perennius whispered to the woman. She was huddled against the post to which she had earlier been tied.

  Flies had buzzed around the dish of chopped loin even while Sabellia was preparing it. They coated the remnants of the confection in the dirt. Many of the insects lay on their backs, quivering with bursts of furious motion but unable to fly or even to crawl. The ground was black besides with still forms which were beyond even that. Their systems had been destroyed as thoroughly as those of the Goths, by the aconite root which Sabellia had called “wild horseradish.”

  The Gallic woman moved swiftly to Perennius. She knelt behind the fence post as Theudas turned. The Goth’s surmise became furious certainty. Sabellia cut the thongs at the agent’s elbows, then those at his wrists, with quick passes of the knife. To its broad blade still clung smears of the poisoned meat which she had served with the weapon.

  Perennius stood and took the knife. The woman tried to hand him her cloak as well, to wrap around his arm in place of a shield. “Get the hell out of the way!” the agent shouted. He braced his left hand against the top of the post. Perennius was stiff, but a bow is stiff also and it kills none the less.…

  Theudas charged. He had drawn his axe even before his eyes lighted on Sabellia. The Goth was no berserker, but sight of the slender woman who had played him for a fool drove him momentarily over the edge. The glint of dark steel in Perennius’ hand brought Theudas up again. The woman scampered nude into the trampled garden.

  “Sure, try me first,” the agent said with a smile. “You aren’t afraid of me, are you? Just because your mother used to suck my cock when we were—”

  Theudas leaped forward again with a swing of his axe.

  Between the length of the axe helve and that of the arm which swung it, the glittering head covered an arc with a seven-foot radius. The blow skimmed short of Perennius. The agent could not take advantage of his opponent’s imbalance because of the injured leg and a knife as his sole weapon. Instead, Perennius slid behind the post that had held him a moment before. A length of thong still dangled from the agent’s right wrist. He laughed at Theudas.

  If Perennius had a shield available, he would have carried it—though even that might have failed the test. The agent had a professional respect for Theudas’ arm and the weight of the Goth’s weapon. A cloak wrapped around the forearm was a good makeshift in some circumstances. It could envelope a sword-edge and cushion its blow in multiple layers of cloth. Against the Goth and his axe, the most a cloak would have done was to act as a ready compress for Perennius’ severed arm. The agent could have flung the garment like a retiarius in the arena, but the cloak was not a weighted net. Theudas’ long left arm would have swept it aside in the air. The agent might have gained a fraction of a second—which his right leg would not permit him to exploit. Instead he stuck to one simple thing: a post stuck in the ground which the Goth could not knock down even in the fury of his charge.

  Theudas cursed and sidled around the obstacle to the left. The Goth held his axe in front of him with both hands. The bitts were level with his eyes and ready to chop or thrust.

  Perennius duplicated the Goth’s movements perfectly. The agent moved a little faster than his opponent because the threat of the axe kept him slightly further from the post than was their common center. In theory, Theudas could have reached him over the post with the axe. The fencepost would have blocked the Goth’s lunge, however, and it would have left his wrists extended to Perennius’ knife if the stroke had missed. The big man cursed and moved; and the Illyrian moved in concert, giving a rich, false laugh.

  The warrior had an audience. Gaius was showing sense enough to hold as still as the post to which he was bound, thank the unconquered Sun. The courier might have made Theudas stumble, but the agent could not have exploited such a misstep. Any such reminder of the captives’ presence would have brought a swift, downward blow from the frustrated Goth—which Perennius could have done nothing to prevent.

  But there were Germans still alive, too. Lest Theudas should forget them, Sabellia crowed, “Say, mighty chieftain! Your boys don’t seem to be helping you. Why don’t you tell a few of them to crawl over and puke on the Roman’s boots? He’s so much bigger than you alone, after all!”

  Despite himself, Theudas glanced back at his men. Storar, doubled up on the ground, stared at his chief with eyes glazed by pain and horror. Respa had followed his pebble on hands and knees into the side of the ship. He was still trying to crawl after the stone. Every time Respa lurched forward, he struck his head on the hull. Then he would pause and do the same thing again … and again.… The rest of the crew lay in various contorted poses like driftwood on the sand. Many of the Goths moaned or twitched, but a few were as still as logs already.

  Theudas roared and slammed into the chest-high post as he swung at the agent.

  Perennius threw himself beneath the horizontal arc of the blow instead of stepping back as he had before. It was a dangerous move, but the Illyrian knew the post would interfere with the Goth’s ability to strike low. As the axe hissed above him, Perennius slashed upward with the speed of a weasel lunging. The agent’s leg was stiff, but there was nothing wrong with his arms or his timing. The knife scored the bones of Theudas’ left wrist. The axe-head’s inertia pulled it through the rest of its arc while blood sprayed the ground.

  The agent rolled to his feet and smiled. He held up the gory blade. “It was poisoned, you know,” he said.

  Theudas screamed and hurled his axe. Unlike Anulf, Perennius was expecting that.

  The blond Goth had arms like a catapult’s. The axe-blade would have sheared a metal-faced shield and the forearm beneath it if it had connected. The weapon’s mass was also its drawback. When Theudas had committed his full strength to the throw, there was no way that even he could deflect it to follow the agent’s sidestep. The axe was still spinning and airborne thirty feet beyond Perennius when it split a post across the garden.

  Then it was the agent’s turn.

  Storar was the closest of the Goths to their chieftain. There was a sword belted to the poisoned man’s shuddering body. Theudas would have bent to draw the weapon, but he saw Perennius out of the corner of his eye. The agent, half the Goth’s bulk and shorter by fifteen inches, was charging.

  Theudas roared and kicked out chest-high. Perennius was waiting for that, too. The agent twisted sideways and grabbed the big foot with his left hand. The maneuver put massive stress on the agent’s own right leg, but all that mattered for the moment was that the leg hold him up for a half second. The pain did not matter, never mattered in a situation like that.… Perennius drew his knife through the soft leather and the Goth’s Achilles tendon, hamstringing the big man.

  Theudas jerked himself clear. His murderous roar had become a shout of surprise. He did not feel the pain as yet. The knife had been only a hot line, a twinge that could have come from bones twisting in the agent’s grip. Then the huge Goth planted his foot firmly and it collapsed under him. He bellowed as he pitched sideways. Perennius was on him.

  It is easy to kill with a knife. A single deep stab into the body cavity is as apt to do it as not … but the death may be days later. The very sharpness of the point is a handicap, for the tissues clamp down on the metal that parts them and seal off the gushing fluids that would otherwise follow the blade’s withdrawal. Sometimes blood seeps into the body cavity like water from a badly-packed valve. At other times, an oozing trail of waste from a punctured bowel permits an early semblance of recovery before fever finally carries the victim off.

  To kill quickly with a knife, you must
slash. That is not easy at all when your opponent is a warrior of Theudas’s strength.

  The Goth fell sideways, but despite his surprise he managed to twist so that he was facing Perennius. His hands were high. The agent threw himself across Theudas’ upper chest. Perennius’ left hand grabbed a swatch of the pirate’s long blond hair. The big man’s arms locked around Perennius’ chest and squeezed. Snakes kill by keeping their victims’ lungs from expanding, thus suffocating them as effectively as a noose around the throat. Theudas, on the other hand, was strong enough to splinter ribs and kill in a spray of blood from bone-torn organs. The Goth tightened his hold. Perennius stabbed hilt-deep, just above the chieftain’s pubis bone. The agent let his own terror of constriction draw the edge up through Theudas’ belly until it lodged in a rib.

  The Goth screamed. Even now, the pain was buried under cushions of shock. Theudas’ lower body felt as if it had been liquefied and was flowing from his bones in warm ripples. He flung Perennius away from him easily and sat up. The Goth stared at his wound with the amazement of an atheist viewing a miracle. The knife had parted sheets of muscle for ten inches up the long torso. The severed fibers contracted, pulling the wound open into an oval a hand’s breadth wide in the middle. Blood and pink intestine coiled through the opening.

  The chieftain’s eyeballs rolled up. He collapsed. Physical shock was only partly responsible.

  All the aches and injuries of the past two days caught up with Perennius when he no longer had the present struggle to sustain him. He knew he had to keep moving, however. His wounds would otherwise bind him as thoroughly as the pirates’ thongs if he permitted them to cool. The agent rolled to his feet, wondering if Theudas had managed to crack a rib after all. Sabellia, holding a sword she had appropriated, was stepping toward Theudas.

  “Don’t,” the agent said. “He’s already dead.”

  “I know he’s dead,” said Sabellia. She began to probe carefully with the point of the sword. She was extending downward the tear in Theudas’ tunic, exposing his genitals. The Gallic woman wore the cloak pinned about her again, though the gap showed she was bare beneath it. She stood stiffly, teasing the cloth apart at full arm’s length and the sword’s.

  “Stop, dammit!” Perennius said. He strode to her, his aches forgotten. For an instant, there was a chance that she might turn the weapon on him. Then his hand gripped hers over the bronze hilt. He used only enough pressure to remind Sabellia that he was there beside her. “Don’t,” he repeated softly.

  “Aulus!” Gaius called from behind them. “For god’s sake, man, cut us free!”

  Both of them ignored the courier. Sabellia glared at the agent and demanded. “Do you think I’ll regret it tomorrow? Is that what you think?”

  “No,” Perennius said. “I think I would.” He released her hand and stepped away.

  Sabellia sobbed and flung down the sword. “If you knew,” she whispered. “If you could only imagine what I dreamed…”

  “You might go cut the others loose,” the agent suggested mildly. “Get some food together for us. I’ll finish up around here.”

  The knife he had used was still lodged in Theudas’s body. Perennius worked it loose from the rib. He was always surprised at his strength during a battle. He would not have thought that he could have embedded the knife so deeply in bone with a straight pull.

  Then he began to cut the throats of the poisoned Goths, starting with Respa because he was still moving.

  Perennius had learned very long before that he should never kill humans. If you kill humans, you wake up screaming in the night. Their faces gape at you at meals or when you make love.… What you must kill are animals. Young animals, female animals—it doesn’t matter to the sword, and it need not matter to the swordsman. Sabellia was thinking of Theudas as the man who had raped her, the man she had forced herself to cuddle against … the man whom she would mutilate so that everyone who saw him would blanch. And despite her certainty, the Goth’s face would be in her dreams, its eyes wide and its mouth choking on bloody genitals.

  Perennius had awakened too many times to the sight of a Frankish raider, a man, wheezing blood. The Frank’s hands were always locked on the spear that a young Roman soldier had just rammed through his chest. It was not an experience Perennius wished to magnify for one he was beginning to think of as a friend.

  You could separate naked, two-legged creatures quite easily into humans and things you must kill. The danger was that at some point your rage might expand the second category until it wholly engulfed the first.

  After a few minutes, Gaius and Sestius joined the agent. Both of them used spears. It was business, necessary because they dared not chance the recovery of even one of the pirates while the five of them were nearby.

  “Are we going to take their ship?” the younger Illyrian asked with a nod at the pirate vessel.

  Perennius had found a long spear for himself as well. He withdrew it with a crunch. “Might,” he said. “Sestius, do you know anything about sailing?”

  The Cilician grunted. “A little,” he said. “Enough to know the few of us wouldn’t even be able to slide this one off the beach.”

  The agent glanced back at Calvus. The tall woman was wearing a tunic again. Perennius’ own experience with the traveller’s strength suggested that Sestius was probably wrong in detail. The basic opinion was valid, however. Main strength and awkwardness might get the ship launched, but it would not help them work it in a squall. “We can buy something to ride,” he said aloud. His eye brushed over the silver tray, the jeweled sword gripped by the Goth he had just finished. “Buy any kit we want, I suppose. The gods know, we aren’t short of money right now.”

  Perennius turned, eyeing the forested foothills of the Taurus Mountains. “For choice,” he went on, “we’d have the century of Marines we were supposed to. But we’ll get by.” He slammed his spear into the chest of another moaning pirate and the ground beneath. “We’ll get by.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The gong cleft the pale air with a note as thin as a bird’s cry.

  “Say, what is that?” asked Sestius. He was leading while Gaius, the other healthy warrior among them, brought up the rear. The party was not straggling, however.

  Perennius pointed full-armed past the centurion. A face of rock soft enough to have been weathered into a spindle overlooked the track by which the party proceeded. It was still about a quarter mile distant. The figure near the spire’s tip was hidden against the pink-touched gray of its surface. Sunlight blinked rhythmically from the stick the figure swung against his gong.

  Sestius paused. He switched the spear he carried to his left hand so that he could try the slip of his sword with his right.

  “Watch that!” Perennius snapped. “Nothing hostile.” The agent began waving his own spear, butt-upward, toward the watchman. “If we act like we’re a bunch of pirates, they’ll turn us into fertilizer as soon as we’re in bowshot. And I wouldn’t blame them.”

  A bell began to chime at a distance beyond the high cone of rock. The stick ceased to flash. A measurable moment later, the last gong-stroke rolled down to the agent and his party. “Well, we’ve been hoping to find a village, haven’t we?” Gaius said aloud. The unusually high pitch of his voice showed that he too was aware that the first meeting was likely to be tense.

  “It’ll be all right,” Perennius said. He knew as he spoke that the words were as much sympathetic magic as a reasoned statement. “Let’s get going.”

  As the party walked on, it was noticeable that they all were trying to proceed quietly, even though they were already discovered. “We’ll be all right,” Sabellia said aloud in unconscious echo of the agent. “Three armed men—four—” a nod toward Calvus who trudged fourth in the file—“they’ll talk, not try fighting right away. And then they’ll see we’re peaceful.” She did not sound convinced either.

  Beyond the rock spire, the twisting defile by which the party proceeded broadened into a valley. It was plan
ted in wheat. The only interruptions in the smooth, green pattern were the ragged lambda shapes where the soil was too wet for the crop to have taken hold. The stems and leaves of the wheat beyond the gaps were a darker color than the sunbleached heads which alone were visible elsewhere. There were no evident fences or even corner stones.

  The huts of the village huddled against the valley’s further slope. There were thirty or so of them. It was hard to tell for sure, because the dwellings overhung one another as they climbed the hill. Most seemed to be small one- or two-room units. Since their backs were cut into the hill, it was impossible to be sure from the outside. There was no town wall. That was not surprising even in the present unsettled times. An enemy who bothered to attack from further up the hillside would be higher than the top of any practicable wall facing him.

  What was surprising was the church.

  “Thank God, we’re among Christians,” Sabellia whispered.

  That much was clear. The building itself was a spire shaped much like the natural outcropping which acted as a watchtower at the valley’s head. At its peak, high enough at eighty feet to stand out against the sky, was a cross. The warning bell continued to ring from the small pergola by which the cross was supported. Beneath the belfry, the building stepped down to the ground in three levels of increasing diameter. The cylindrical walls were of native stone. The ashlars had been quarried recently enough to retain a pinkish yellow color which contrasted with the weathered gray of the slope beyond. The building had not been vaulted or even corbelled. Instead, the builders had used trusses and thatch for the three stepped roofs. That implied that each successive level of the spire was supported on vertical columns extending from the ground to the level’s base. That was an incredibly awkward way to design a structure of the church’s magnitude. It was also proof of the dedication of simple villagers who had executed so impressive a monument to their god without help from the outside.