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
