a moment. Fragments of chopped meat still clung to Respa's grizzled beard. 'Well, let's see we've finished the job,' he said. He climbed over the gunwale with his sword out. After a moment, he reappeared brandishing Theudas' axe. Its head was smeared with blood and pinkish brains. 'Hail Theudas!' he roared. The rest of the pirates echoed the shout as they crowded around their new chief.
It was almost inevitable that the Goths would jostle the tray from Sabellia's hands. Perennius noticed the fact only because he was trying to notice everything in hope that there would be something useful in the confusion. Sabellia herself reacted with the rage and horror of a housewife staring back at the rat in her flour bin. She cried out and tried to force away the nearest of the men. They ignored her. Germans trampled the meat into the dirt, each of them twice her weight and strength. Sabellia had guided the band of pirates with skill, but she could no more overpower them than she could halt an avalanche. The agent realized that he had been seeing a cruder example of the influencing technique that Calvus had described herself as using. An example both of the technique and of its limitations.
Several of the Goths tramped toward the ship to bring out the remaining wine. Theudas began to polish the
head of the axe Respa had returned to him. The new chief basked in adulation, though he must have known that the grumbling against him would start at least as soon as the wine was exhausted. Sabellia took advantage of the space around Theudas for the moment to grasp the big man's arm. 'Oh - oh King,' she said her voice desperately trying to regain its girlishness. 'You didn't get your portion. And after all, it was for you that I - '
Theudas shrugged the woman aside with as little rancor as effort. The big Goth had more on his mind than a woman now. 'Get out of the way, bitch,' he rumbled as he thrust the axe helve back through his belt, 'or we'll make last night seem gentle.' Theudas switched his attention to the men returning with the wine. Two of them offered him a silver-mounted cow horn, brim-full and dripping from having been immersed in an amphora.
Sabellia had fallen, though Theudas had not shown enough interest to strike her. Her bare legs splayed, then were hidden again as the woman drew them under the borrowed cloak. She continued to squat on the ground. Her red hair glowed in the sun. Perennius could not see Sabellia's eyes, but he was quite sure that it was on Theudas that they were fixed. He did see her right hand disappear beneath her cloak. The hand held the knife which, like her, the Goths had forgotten in their new excitement.
Calvus spoke. It was with shock that Perennius realized that he had not heard the traveller's voice since the rapists had displayed her sex. In fact, Calvus' voice was as empty of sexual character as it was of accent. Like her clothed body, the voice permitted the assumption of masculinity but it really offered no evidence on the subject.
The second shock was the language Calvus used. The traveller was speaking to Sabellia in Allobrogian Celtic. There was no chance that any of these South-Baltic Germans would speak the dialect, but it was very familiar to the agent himself. In his youth, Allobrogian had been his language of love, the language of his love. . . .
'Don't become overanxious,' Calvus was saying. 'You've done very well. Now it's time to wait and not attract attention.'
A shudder went through the Gallic woman, showing that she had heard. Her head lowered from the fixed aim she had been holding like the trough of a ballista. Use of a dialect from her childhood had cut through her black reverie as well as hiding the advice from the pirates.
Sabellia turned. She eyed the line of her fellow captives. Her face was as lifeless as clay with reaction to the facades of moments before and the emotions underlying it. Biarni used a dagger to spear gobbets of boiled meat and toss them to his fellows. The cripple was not the center of attention, but at least he was no longer the fool of a foreign slut.
'Don't try anything now,' the traveller continued. Calvus lowered her voice to make the fact that the prisoners were conferring less obvious to their carousing captors. 'It's too early, and in broad daylight you'll be seen. Only act when you have to; the later the better.'
Sabellia nodded. Her expression was tired and disinterested.
'And if you can free only one of us,' continued the gentle whisper from the agent's past, 'it should be Aulus Perennius.'
At that instruction, Sabellia looked up. As if Perennius were not present - and she might not know that the dialect was more than nonsense syllables to an Illyrian like him - she said, 'He's wounded. I thought Quintus or perhaps the young one. He handles a sword....'
'Lady,' said Perennius, 'don't worry about my leg.' Sabellia stared at him. Calvus was watching also. The tall woman's face wore its normal calm and a trace of the new smile. 'If you get a chance to cut us loose,' the agent continued, 'one swordsman won't do a lot of good. I might. I just might.'
'Hey, shut the fuck up!' Respa shouted. He threw a shoulder blade at the agent. The heavy bone bounced off the post as Perennius jerked his head aside. The missile left behind the smell of cooked flesh and a bubble of laughter from the Goths seated for toasts and boasting.
Calvus' advice, to wait and attract as little attention as possible, was good. Perennius had a great deal of experience in waiting. Let them get drunk or whatever the traveller had in mind. The agent quietly flexed his muscles against each other or against the post. His wounded thigh was far less knotted by the trauma than it should have been. He wondered if that had something to do with the tingling Calvus' fingers had left behind as they bandaged the wound.
Perennius kept his own smile inside. He had experience in doing that, also. When he let his emotions show on his face while he prepared, people shied away as if they had seen a shark grinning.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Three hours later, the pirates were slurping the last of their wine. A Goth named Veduc was describing, victim by victim, the seventy Romans he had slain the day before. It was the sort of performance that followed each victory; and a night's drunken stupor had turned the disaster of the previous day into the triumph of the present. Veduc swept his arms outward and fell on his back with a crash. The shield with which he had been gesturing clipped Grim. The one-armed man leaped up, cursing and dabbing at his bloody ear. Veduc began to mumble and raise his legs as if he were trying to walk forward, straight up the sky.
There was laughter, but not the raucous gales that the drunkenness should have heightened. Several of the Goths seemed to have slumped on their sides. Perennius' eyes narrowed. Respa, the veteran who had first hailed Theudas, now leaned forward. He started to crawl toward the center of the circle on all fours. Respa kept scrabbling at the ground, turning over and over a pebble as he shuffled through the midst of his fellows.
'Whoo, Respa's past it!' crowed a black-haired Goth wearing a Roman helmet. The speaker's face changed abruptly. He doubled up and began to vomit. His hands pressed to his belly. In between the wracking tremors, he gave squeals of animal pain.
There were more men suddenly on their feet or trying to get there. Hulking pirates swayed, looking around in horror as if the landscape were a sea of flames around them. One of them dabbed at his face with both hands. At first he patted gently. After a moment he began giving himself brutal slaps that stained his moustache with his own blood. 'It's not there!' he cried. His voice was slurred. 'I can't feel my face and I can't feel my hands!' He began to cry. Again and again he squeezed his palms to his cheeks as his hands slipped away.
Theudas rose. The man standing beside him whimpered and laid a hand on the chieftain's shoulder. 'Storar?' Theudas said, looking at the pirate who had grabbed at him. Storar screamed and clutched himself as if he were trying to hold in his slashed bowels. His sphincter muscles opened. A gush of half-digested waste poured down his pants legs. The stink of it had enough impact, even among the surrounding horror, that Theudas backed away with his nose wrinkling.
The circle of boasting, drinking heroes had scattered like a straw fence in a windstorm. Nearby, oblivious to them as they were to him, Biarni was clutching the cooking tripod to keep himself upright. Biarni's eyes were glazed. The iron leg must have been very hot, but the cook showed no sign of feeling the damage. One of his palms slipped. His twisted body fell in a cloud of ash that mounted on the column of hot air. The pot and tripod overset, clanging. Boiling water sloshed on the coarse soil. It did not touch the flames that Biarni's struggles were stirring in the heart of the fire.
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.
