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 7 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 planted 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
