A dying light in Corduba

LXIII

He had two beats of time to reduce me to a jelly, but he missed his chance. After that it was my turn.

I had made a bad mistake with Cornix once: I had escaped his clutches and publicly humiliated him. The mere fact that I was alive today was because in my time as a slave I had continually outwitted him. Since I had been shackled, starved, despairing, and close to dying at the time, it was all the more commendable.

'I'm going to smash in your head,' he told me, in the same old sickening croak. 'And after that, we'll really have some fun!'

'Still the tender-hearted giant! Well, well, Cornix Who let you out of your cage?'

'You're going to die,' he glowered. 'Unless you've got a girl to rescue you again?'

This kind of delay – with its attendant danger – was the last thing I could afford. The girl who had once rescued me was heading for the coast, in a condition where she sorely needed me.

'No, Cornix. I am alone and unarmed, and I'm in a strange place. Obviously you have all the advantages.'

I was being too meek for him. He wanted threats. He wanted me to defy him and force him to fight me. One or two people were already watching. Cornix was yearning for a big display, but it had to be my fault. He was the kind of rowdy who only picked on slaves, and then covertly in corners. His official role was as a tough manager who never put a foot wrong. In Britain his superiors had been told the truth eventually, and it must be due to me that after the shake-up I organised there he had had to roam abroad to find himself a new position. Just my luck he had found it here.

'I'm glad we've had this little chat,' I said very quietly. 'It's always good to renew acquaintance with an old friend!'

I ruined away. My contempt was iron-hard and just as cold. Refusing to antagonise the bastard was the surest way to achieve it. There were tools and timber everywhere. Unable to bear my forbearance Cornix grabbed a mining pick and came after me. That was his mistake.

I too had sized up possible weapons. I caught up a shovel, swung it, and banged the pick from his grip. I was angry, and I had no fear. He was out of condition and stupid, and he thought he was still dealing with someone utterly exhausted. Three years of exercise had given me more power than he could cope with. He soon knew.

'You have two choices, Cornix. Give up and walk away – or find out what pain means!' He roared with rage and rushed me with his bare hands. Since I knew where Cornix liked to put his snag-nailed fingers, I was determined not to let him get in close. I used my knee, my fists, my feet. I released more anger than I even knew I had, though dear gods, I had lived with the memories long enough.

The nick was short. It was nasty. Slowly his oxen brain realised more was called for than he generally had to use. He began to fight harder. I was enjoying the challenge, but I had to be careful. He possessed brute strength, and he had no qualms about how he used his body. I was staving him off with punches and kicks when he bore down on me and grappled me. His roars and the familiar smell of him were churning me up. Then I broke free for a moment. Someone else took a hand. A bystander I had hardly noticed stepped forward adroitly, and passed me a gallery prop. The roughhewn round timber weighed something terrible, though I hardly felt it. I swung the pole at chest height, with all my force. It felled Cornix with a pleasing crack of broken ribs.

'Oh nice! I learned that from you, Cornix!'

I could easily have brought the timber down on his skull. Why sink to his level? Instead, I raised the prop above my head and crashed it down across his shins. His scream sang sweetly in my ears. When I left he would never be able to follow me.

Suddenly I felt a lot better about a lot of things.

I turned to thank my rescuer and had a shock. For the second time I had escaped that brute's clutches through intervention of a female kind.

I knew I had seen her somewhere, though she lacked the kind of beauty that my brain catalogues. She was of an age where her age had ceased to matter, though clearly full of spirit and energy by the way she had helped me out. She looked nothing, just a dumpling you could see selling eggs on a market stall. She wore a brown outfit with extra swaddlings in unbleached linen, topped by untidy swags of straw-like hair emerging from a scarf. A battered satchel was slung across a bosom that wouldn't raise excitement in a galley-slave who had just set foot on land for the first time in five years. Eyes of an indeterminate colour were surveying me from a face as lively as wet plaster. She showed no reserve about being here on a site that seemed otherwise exclusively for men. Most of them had not even noticed her.

'You saved my life, madam.'

'You were coping. I just threw in some help.'

'We must have met before.' I was still gasping. 'Remind me of your name?'

She gave me a long stare. While I blinked back at her she stretched out one pointed shoe, and drew a sign in the dust with her toe: two curved lines with a smudge in between them. A human eye.

'I'm Perella,' she said matter-of-factly. Then I remembered her: the surly blonde who had originally been booked to dance for the entertainment of the Olive Oil Producers of Baetica.