'There may be scale in the middle of the best-looking joint in the world. Put pressure on it and it'll snap like glass. It's not like you can see through iron, after all ... is it?'
'Damn, what the hell's going on?' Gaius muttered. He tried to roll over so that he could look at the people touching him. His own hands did not quite have the degree of feeling which would permit them to support him.
'No, I wasn't raised to see through iron,' the tall woman said. Perennius could not be sure whether or not there was humor in her voice. 'When the guard struck the grating, though, it rattled as a unit - not as so many discrete bars. They must have been very careful in their work. If one bar could be loosened, I could use it to snap a hole in the remainder; but that doesn't seem to be the case.'
'Yeah, bastards are careful, all right,' the agent muttered. He lifted Gaius into a sitting posture, ignoring the younger man's repeated demands for information. 'And you can tell that just by hearing a club hit it?'
'Yes, Aulus Perennius,' the tall woman said patiently. She slid herself over to Sestius. The Gallic woman had been listening to the conversation as she continued to massage the centurion.
'All right,' Perennius said. 'Would the club be enough of a lever to get things started?'
Calvus paused and looked out into the other room. Erzites was invisible from where she knelt, but the cudgel leaning against his bed was in her line of sight. 'Perhaps,' she said. 'Perhaps.'
'Well, something better may turn up ... and it may not,' the agent muttered. 'I figure we'll go with what we've got.' He snorted under his breath. 'What we're going to have if we get lucky.' He stood up again and walked to the door. He was careful not to touch the metal.
Erzites noticed the motion. One large, hairy hand gripped the end of the cudgel, though the villager neither spoke nor moved further at the moment. Behind Perennius, Sestius was beginning to groan into wakefulness. The agent called in a mild voice, 'How long's it going to be before they decide to kill us, Erzites?'
The cudgel head tapped the floor lightly while the villager made a decision as to how to react. At last he got up and walked toward the grating. Light reflected by the bars would make Perennius behind them little more than a voice and a blur. At last Erzites said, 'When the Lord sends them a sacrifice - so they say - they spend as long in church, praying and singing, as it takes him to die. Him or her,' the villager corrected himself.
Erzites fingered the coin he wore as a medallion. It hung by a thong reeved through a hole punched in its rim. It was a Termessian double obol, old enough to be ' real silver and so worn that the snakes intertwined on its obverse were only a pattern of shadows. 'Fucking sick, I call it,' the guard continued, 'but it's their business. . . . Mostly it's one at a time or two. You lot were rare, getting that many who really wouldn't be missed. But who's to say you ever got clear of the pirates, Ramphion puts it to me when I wonder? And it's their business, my brother and me we just watch the larder.'
Perennius nodded encouragingly. He was wondering whether he would have an opportunity to torture the guard before killing him.
'They won't come for any of you while the last one's still alive,' Erzites went on. 'That'll take, who knows? Maybe three days? Had one flat croak when they clamped him to the wall a couple years ago....' The guard frowned and began counting with his left index finger against the fingers wrapped around the grip of his club. 'Maybe it was four years ago?' he said in puzzlement. 'But I figure you got a while yet. Way this last one bellered when they dragged him out, he ain't going to croak for a while.'
Perennius noticed that while the villager was no longer showing any particular hostility toward his charges, neither was he coming incautiously close. Any attempt to grab Erzites through the bars would fail a foot short, even given the length of Calvus' slender arms.
'Why, they'd be lost without you and your brother, wouldn't they?' prompted the agent. He was careful to avoid any suggestion of treachery. It wasn't time for that yet, especially since Perennius had not yet figured out what sort of offer might be attractive to someone in Erzites' position.
'Too damn right!' the villager agreed with a series of vigorous nods. 'Why, they'd go nuts trying to pick who'd watch the meat and who'd watch the road. Figure they'd be damned to bloody Hell if they missed the vigil, so they call it. Course it's damned hard lines for Azon and me when they get big eyes the way they did with you lot.' He spat against the bars, but the anger behind the gesture was clearly directed at Ramphion and his sectaries rather than at their imprisoned victims. 'Talk about freezing your butt off up there on the rock . . .' Erzites continued. 'And it's no damn pleasure being stuck here with the meat, either, every damn hour I'm not up there.' He jerked his cudgel, presumably toward the head of the valley. It was an angry, sexual gesture.
'Just like you weren't even human,' Perennius sympathized. 'Say, any chance of getting some wine? I know, I don't suppose we're meant to have it, but just a taste'd sure make - '
'Shit!' the guard said. 'You get wine? / don't get wine, not a sip. It's a fucking sacrament, it's only for them when they're nailing somebody up, don't you know. Wine.' He turned away from the door. As he walked back to his couch, he muttered, 'I hear other places people just drink wine any time they feel like it.' His couch squealed under his weight. 'They don't have to steal a cupful and hide when they drink it....'
'That's right, Erzites,' the agent said. Perennius was irritated at the pleading note he seemed to hear in his own voice. That was bad form for a pitch like the one he was making. 'And you know, smart men like you and your brother could make it big with help from - '
'Shut the hell up!' the guard shouted. 'I don't want to hear about it, you know? Shut up!'
Perennius slipped back a step into the protective darkness of the cell. His companions watched him silently. All of them were now alert. The agent spread his arms, drawing the others' heads close to his by suggestion rather than by actual contact. The couch continued to creak in the other room as their guard settled his weight. 'We need to get his attention,' Perennius said softly, 'and we need to get it on one of you. Now, I don't like the choices, but it seems to me the only thing we've got to offer is sex. . . .'
Sabellia's sudden tautness was no greater than the tension that had gripped Perennius' bowels for minutes, while his mind planned and his mouth had spoken friendly words. The agent continued to speak now as if he were ignorant of the effect he was having.
Because like it or not, they had no other choice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
'Hey, Erzites?' Sestius called in a husky whisper. There was no need for silence, but the tone seemed appropriate to the purpose.
The greatest problem had been to convince Sestius of what he must do. The centurion had foreseen Sabellia's role in the skit, but it had been a shock to him that he would have to act as her pimp. Sestius could see that Perennius had to remain as far out of focus as possible; and it was obvious that neither Gaius nor Bella herself spoke enough Cilician to carry out the task. The centurion had still balked, with an increasing and unreasoning anger that came near explosion. That would have called Erzites' premature attention, so the possibility had Perennius measuring Sestius for a rabbit punch.
It was only after Calvus laid long fingers on the centurion's cheek and throat that Sestius had grown calm again.
Even that had not ended the discussion - or rather, had not brought Sestius around to what the others regarded as reason. He had shuddered frequently while Perennius pressed his case. No one suggested that Calvus could do the talking. Though the woman had not spoken a word of Cilician in his hearing, the agent was sure of her fluency in that dialect. Her grotesque appearance - grotesque if one knew her real sex and did not know her as a person - made her a dangerous risk for the job, however.
The darkness had been enhanced by the fact that the prisoners were huddled in a back corner of the cell. The two large pots along the wall, for water and their wastes, screened them further. Sabellia had whispered abruptly, 'Morals don't matter. You can do it easy, you have to do it if we're going to get out. You didn't watch them crucifying the fellow they brought in, you were gone by then. I don't want to be up on that wall next.'
'Easy!' the centurion sneered. 'Sure, I saw you prancing with those goddamned Germans, I saw you - '
'Did you see me before that, too?' the woman rasped back. Her right hand gripped Perennius' shoulder. He could feel her tremble like an arrow drawn to the head. 'Did you watch them rape me, Quintus? Twenty-three times. I counted every one, I could only count. . . . Did you want that to go on every day until I - don't you turn your head away! Every day till I bled out! Is that what you wanted?'
'I'm sorry, Bella,' the centurion had mumbled.
'Don't be sorry,' she snapped back. 'Act like a man and it won't happen again.'
The Cilician had nodded. 'All right,' he said, 'all right.'
Now the guard turned to his charges. They had waited until he got up and tore off a piece of a loaf from the
