Birds of Prey (23 page)

“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. His 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.

“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.”