Setting the gasping Stephen on the blood-sticky floor by her, Caroline knelt by Mme. Villeneuve. She loosened the widow’s collar and supported her neck. Natural color began to return to the older woman’s face. Her eyes searched Caroline’s. Her lips formed words but no sound. Caroline leaned close to hear the woman over her child’s panicked shrieks.
“Jeannot,” the woman whispered through the pain in her throat.
42
Eye to Eye
From atop the hill, Lee Hammond saw the figures appear from the grass as if by magic. They converged on the loose gathering of men down at the camp on the slope below his position. He was sighting on one of the attackers when he heard a whisper of movement in the grass behind him. Spinning around, he saw three naked men, smeared head to toe with mud, racing toward him with raised swords.
The men rushed in from the dark all around the camp. They were among the escaped slaves and their liberators inside of a heartbeat. The attackers were naked but for skirts and singlets. They made Bat think of the cheap Hercules movies her dad still liked from when he was a kid. The men wore short-cropped hair that identified them as Romans. Within seconds half of their party was on the ground dead or wounded and the rest fighting for their lives. Gunfire exploded close. Chaz was in the fight somewhere behind her.
Bat drew her Sig Sauer and brought down a man who thrust at her with a spear point gleaming with fresh blood. She turned and sighted on another man hacking at a fallen slave with a short sword. A double-tap lifted that man off his feet.
A hammer blow between her shoulder blades drove her stumbling. She turned, dropping to one knee and sent a three-round burst into a swordsman rearing back for a second strike. A dull ache turned to lancing agony as she fought to regain her feet. The armor caught the sword blow. She wasn’t cut but she took all the blunt force between the shoulder blades. Gasping, she dropped to her knee again. A wet gasp sounded close behind her. She threw herself on her side and swung the Sig’s sights toward the source. Byrus was there, drawing the blade of his gladius from the back of a Roman’s head. The man buckled to the dirt, his blood streaming from a mortal wound to shower over Byrus.
The Macedonian wore a face of pure feral menace. Gone was the genial grin she’d grown accustomed to over the course of the march. This was the pit fighter she was seeing, an animal spirit that had survived God alone knew what horrors to live to this day.
He rushed to stand astride her, catching the blade of a new attacker on his. She rolled on her back and fired two rounds point blank into the attacker’s crotch. The man fell back howling, with Byrus riding him to the ground, chopping furiously. Bat struggled to her feet and made for where Boats lay unprotected. Her feet tangled in something. She fell hard. A Roman had used the pole of his spear to trip her. He stood over her, chuckling darkly.
Bat whipped the Sig to line up on him, but the man was fast and struck her wrist with the butt of the spear. Her fingers went numb. The automatic spun from her hand. The man bent to grip the bodice of her armor. She drove the heel of her hand into his face with all her force. The blow smeared his nose across his face with a liquid crunching sound. Blood jetted from his nostrils.
He kept his hold on her and drove her back down on the ground. The back of her head struck the hard earth. She saw white speckles at the edges of her vision. The Roman spat a gobbet of hot blood in her face before setting to tearing the armor from her. The buckles frustrated his efforts. He sat hard atop her to draw a knife from his girdle to begin sawing at the straps.
One hand feebly slapped at her attacker while the other sought the Colt snubby from the concealed carry holster on her belt. His weight was bearing down on her midriff and she couldn’t get her fingers to it.
The man took a handful of her hair and banged her head off the ground once again. The speckles covered her narrowing field of vision for an instant. She fought back the darkness long enough to drive fingers up toward the man’s ruined nose. She got two fingers into the mess of fractured gristle and hooked them both hard. The man roared in pain and swatted at her blindly, his hands striking glancing blows off her face and shoulders. He shifted his weight, trying to release himself from her two-fingered grip buried deep in the soft flesh of his septum. She rose up with him, fingers locked into twin hooks.
Her other hand dove under her pinned thigh and found the rubber grip of the .38. He was shrieking now and clasping her arm in both his hands, trying to force her to release her hold. Bat twisted her wrist upward and jerked the trigger of the holstered Colt.
A searing heat washed down her leg. The weight of the man came off her waist. Her fingers were jerked free of his face in a gush of blood. She freed the snubby and fired three more rounds center mass, spilling the man back. Rising to a sitting position against a crushing tide of nausea she could see Jimmy Smalls swinging his Winchester like a club against a pair of brawny Romans with short swords.
From behind her, she heard a heavy chopping sound. A man’s body fell beside her, spasming as the blood left it, gushing, around the
