Birds Of Prey

The agent swore and slid past Sabellia to the deck again. He felt a sick fury at what he saw. The pirate ships had been at the limit of sight on the horizon. They had now halved the distance separating themselves from the liburnian, even though they were beating to windward. A major reason that the pirates were closing so fast was that the liburnian had sheered slightly to starboard but had not turned directly away from the hostile ships.

Before the sighting, the Eagle had been proceeding toward her next landfall on the fair wind and a reduced stroke by all her rowers. The oars had added perhaps two knots to the three that sail alone would have offered her. Now the sea was frothing to either side under the full power of the oars, increasing the ship's speed by at least a half despite the state of the hull and the rowers' inexperience. In consequence, the Eagle was nearing the pirates—or the one of the pair which lay half a mile to the other's port - that much the faster.

A seaman was scrambling down the ladder from the poop. Instead of waiting for him, Perennius gripped the poop coaming with both hands and swung himself up - waist high, then legs slicing sideways in an arc. His sword and dagger still lay on the main deck where he had been working, but the pouch he had snatched from the cabin slammed him leadenly in the ribs.

The captain was a Tarantine named Leonidas whose experience had been entirely on the smaller Customs vessels. Now he was screaming toward the mainmast. The Marine detachment was becoming entangled with the bosun and a party of seamen who were attempting some activity with the sail. Sestius was already sorting out the confusion. The centurion was leading half the small unit sternward, while the remainder stumbled toward the bow with Longidienus, their original commander.

Ignoring the tangle as a problem solved, Perennius rose to his feet in front of the captain. "Why are we sailing toward the pirates instead of away?" the agent demanded. The short question ended loudly enough to be heard all over the ship, because Leonidas had started to turn away while the agent addressed him.

The Greek seaman spun back around with a look of fury. "Do you want to take over?" he screamed in the agent's face. "Aren't you quite sure your orders have gotten us killed already? Hermes and Fortune, I'm sure!"

Sick despair threatened to double Perennius up. There was no unified command on the Eagle. That was his fault. It was perhaps inevitable as well, because Perennius had neither the talent nor the training for organizing other people. He could carry out a task himself or lead others if they cared to follow him; but he had never cared enough about command to try to learn why men who were not self-starters as he was seemed willing to take suicidal risks for some officers.

So the agent had command of the Eagle only by virtue of orders on a scrap of papyrus. That had increasingly little effect as death reached for the liburnian against the wind. Perennius had shown no interest in Leonidas and his deck crew, so long as they provided the transportation he required; and if the efforts of the oarsmen below were meshed effectively with those of the seamen proper, then that was nothing for which Perennius could take credit either. Now the ship was in danger, and there was no plan for how it could fight or run as a unit.

Swallowing an anger that was now directed at himself and not the captain, Perennius said, "Leonidas, I'll do what I can to save us now, but you'll have to tell me what to expect."

. Behind Leonidas there were four sailors instead of the usual one, leaning their weight on the tiller which controlled the paired steering oars. The liburnian was heeling enough to the right that Perennius suspected the blade on the port side must barely be clipping the waves. The starboard oar would be providing full turning force. Leonidas gestured toward his straining men and said, "If the gods grant the wind freshens, we'll pass to port of both of those bastards and be able to make land safely if the oarsmen hold out - as they will not." He spat over the railing with an angry intensity which he seemed to be trying to direct away from the agent. He looked back again sharply. "No way we can keep them from stripping and burning the ship, but we can maybe get our own bums clear."

The agent's mouth was dry. He wished he had his sword hilt for his hand to squeeze. "All right," he said, looking past the windward edge of the sail toward the pirate who was already more nearly ahead of them than on their port quarter. Even if a fresher breeze did add a knot or two to the Eagle's speed, it was too late to hope that would get them clear. "Can we ram?" Perennius went on with as little emotion as possible. As if he did not know the bronze beak had not been replaced, as if he had not heard Niger's sneering certainty that any of the laid-up vessels would crumble to dust if they struck another ship.

"Buggering Zeus!" screamed the Tarantine captain as panic and frustration overcame his momentary control, "don't you see the fucking mast's still stepped? We're not in fighting trim, we're cruising. If we hit anything now, the whole thing, spar, cordage, and sail, comes down across our deck and the oars! Wouldn't you rather we just lay to and surrendered without all that fuss?"

The bosun shrieked a question to Leonidas from amidships. It was unintelligible to Perennius not for language - the vessel worked on Common Greek - but for vocabulary. The captain pushed past Perennius to answer, and this time the agent let him go. Leonidas would do his best in conditions which were likely impossible. For his own part, the agent now had an idea that might at least offer more than prayer seemed likely to do.

Perennius leaped to the main deck again with a crash of boots which the confusion swallowed. He landed near the aft hatchway, which he ignored. If he went below that way, he would have to struggle the length of the rowing chamber while it was filled with fear and flailing oar-handles. Despite the chaos on deck, the agent could get to the small galley forward better by dodging the sailors and humming ropes above.

One of the pirates was close enough to be seen clearly, now. As the agent had feared, the vessel was not of Mediterranean design at all. The sail was the pale yellow of raw wool, criss-crossed diagonally by leather strips sewn across the stretchy fabric. The wool bellied noticeably in the squares within those reinforcements, but even a lands-man like Perennius could see that the pirates' sail met the wind at a flatter angle than did that of the Eagle.

Half a do/en years before, the Goths and Borani had begun raiding the Black Sea coasts in ships crewed by Greeks from the old settlements at the mouth of the Danube. In the past year, however, another tribe, the Herulians, had made the long trek to the Black Sea. The Herulians had begun building craft of the same type as their ancestors had used to sail the Baltic. If the Eagle's opponents had depended on Greeks, either hirelings or slaves, there would have been a slender hope of confusion or mutiny within the pirate ranks. There was no hope of that now.

The liburnian was so much bigger than her opponents - heavier, in all likelihood, than both together - that she looked to overmatch them entirely. Perennius kept thinking of a cow pursued by wolves. From the expressions on the faces of the seamen he passed, most of them took an even less optimistic view of the Eagle's chances than he did himself. The nearer of the pirates was in plain view. The ship was as broad as the liburnian, but it had only a single open deck over the ribs which joined together the hull planks. It was shorter than the liburnian, seventy-five or eighty feet long in comparison to the Eagle's hundred and ten feet at the water line. As such, the Germans should have sailed poorly against the wind. That they did not was a result of three developments, visible as the ships bore down on their prey.

First, there were flat cutwaters fore and aft. These increased the effective length of the hulls and greatly aided the vessels' resistance to slipping sideways under the pressure of breezes from ahead or alongside. Second, when the prow of the nearer pirate lifted from a wave with a geyser of foam and a cheer from her complement, Perennius could see that the cutwaters were extended below the shallow hull by a true keel. Though the pirate vessels still drew far less water than the Eagle, the sheer-sided keel was clearly an advantage against stresses in which the liburnian's rounded bottom allowed her to wallow. The final development was the one which gave the Germans' bulging sails the effectiveness of the tighter, civilized Ro-

man weave. A long pole was socketed in the lee gunwale of each ship. The pole reached across at a diagonal to the forward edge of the sail, half-way up, where it was clamped. The pole kept the edge of the sail from fluttering and halving its effect as it met the wind at a flat angle.

Skipping like melonseeds, the pirate vessels closed on the fat liburnian. They sailed at an angle the Eagle could not have matched except when she was driven solely by her oars. It was obvious now to the agent why Leonidas had been unwilling to try to flee into the wind.

Perennius would have cheerfully granted sailing excellence to the Northerners if the Eagle had aboard the eighty trained soldiers whom he had requested. Physical danger frightened the Illyrian less than other aspects of life did; but even so, the threat they faced - he and Calvus and the mission - with twenty ex-slaves chilled him. The pirate ships were not being rowed, though they surely had some provision for sweeps. One of the reasons the oars were not in use was the fact that both ships were packed to the gunwales with men.

There must have been over a hundred Germans on the nearer vessel, though the way they crowded into the bow permitted only a rough estimate. Nearer to their enemies, nearer to slaughter and gory .. . Many of the warriors wore scraps of armor, a breastplate or helmet or even, in one case, a pair of bronze greaves which must once have guarded the shins of some gladiator. The glittering metal gave more the impression of gaudy decoration than it did a fear of wounds, however. The Germans' clothing was a similar melange. It ranged from skins worn flesh-side out, through the booty of civilization - tunics of linen and wool, and a flowing silk chlamys which must have draped a very wealthy lady indeed at formal gatherings - to more or less total nudity.

In a few cases, the nudity might have had a religious significance, but Perennius suspected that in general it was merely a response to the sun reflecting from the southern sea. Besides body armor, most of the Germans carried shields. These were either simple disks of wood or wicker, or heavier items captured from the imperial forces.

Axes, swords and daggers were common, but every man seemed to carry a spear in his right hand. As they neared their victim, the pirates began clashing the flats of their spear-blades against their shields while they howled. There was no attempt to shout in unison. The deliberate cacophony rasped over the waves. It had the nerve-wracking timbre of millstones grinding with no grain between to cushion their sound.

Gaius called from the fighting tower. Longidienus was trying to grab the agent's arm. "No time!" Perennius shouted as he swept past. The forward hatch was closed. Perennius wrenched it up with a bang. The galley was the area forward of the rowing chamber where the bows narrowed. As the hatch lifted, the boom of the coxswain's drum and the grunt of the oarsmen in unison hammered the agent's ears. Six faces stared up in terror - the cook and his assistant, and four slaves, probably brought aboard. as officer's servants despite Perennius' orders to the contrary. Even in the present crisis, veins stood out in the agent's neck at proof that his will had been flouted.

Ignoring the companion ladder as usual, the stocky Illyrian jumped below. A slave squealed and rolled out of the path of the hobnails. The lower deck was a stinking Hell, its air saturated with the sweat of men rowing for their lives. The drum boomed its demands from the coxswain's seat in the stern. The coxswain's assistant paced nervously along the catwalk between the rowing benches, shrieking encouragement and flicking laggards with a ' long switch. The law did not permit the whipping of I freemen, citizens of Rome, without trial; but the nearest * magistrate was a dozen miles away, and there were two shiploads of Germans in between.

The galley was not intended for cooking while the Eagle was under way. The liburnian had no sleeping accommodations for the oarsmen, one for every foot of her hull length. Thus she virtually had to be docked or beached every night. The galley did provide a location for the cook to chop vegetables and grind meal for the next day's bread, however, and to cook under cover when conditions on shore were particularly bad. Men bore cold rain under a leather tarpaulin far better with a hot meal in their

bellies than they did without. The ship's ready stores were kept in amphoras, pottery jars whose narrow bases were sunk in a sand table to keep them upright while the ship rolled.

And with the foodstuffs was another jar which held the coals from which the oven and campfires would be kindled when the ship made land. That had been a source of unspoken fear to Perennius in the past days. He had seen a warship burn in the harbor at Marseilles, the pitch and sun-dried wood roaring into a blossom of flame with awesome suddenness. Startled sailors had leaped into the sea or to the stone docks with no chance to pick a landing spot, some drowning, some smashing limbs. But at this juncture, the danger of self-destruction was outweighed by the certainty of what the pirates would do if the agent did not accept the risk.

"Oil!" Perennius snapped to the cook who jumped back as if the finger pointed at his face were a weapon.

"Which is the bloody oil jar?" the agent shouted. He began opening the stores containers and flinging their clay stoppers behind him in fury. Grain, grain . . . fish sauce, half-full and pungent enough to make itself known against the reek of the rowing chamber -

The cook's assistant, an Egyptian boy, had not cringed away from Perennius' anger. He reached past the agent and tapped an amphora with the nails of one smooth-fingered hand.

Perennius grunted thanks and gripped the jar by its ears. The amphora was of heavy earthenware with a clear glaze to seal it to hold fluids. It was held so firmly by the sand and the adjacent vessels that the agent's first tug did not move it. With the set face of one who deals with a problem one step at a time, Perrennius lifted again with a twist. The oil jar came free with a scrunch of pottery, allowing the jars beside it to shift inward. The cook stared in amazement. He would not have tried to remove a jar without knocking loose the wedge that squeezed all six into a single unit.

"Longidienus!" the agent shouted to the open hatchway as he swung with his burden. The watch-stander and a majority of his Marine section were already staring into the galley in preference to watching the oncoming pirates. "Take this and hand it up to Gaius in the tower!"

The Marine reached down and grunted. He had been unprepared for the amphora's weight by the ease with which it had been swung to him. Perennius ignored the oil jar as soon as it left his hand. What he needed now was the container with the fire. Its slotted clay stopper identified it with no doubt or frustration, with only a thrill of fear.

"Help the Legate with his jar!" Longidienus ordered the Marines as he shuffled toward the tower with his own load. His men looked in concern at one another. The Latin command was not one they had practiced during the voyage. In any case, Perennius had no intention of trusting the fire pot to any hands but his own at the moment. The earthenware was startlingly warm to the touch; not so hot that it could not be handled, but hot enough that the flesh cringed at first contact as it would from a spider leaping onto it unseen. Perennius locked the jar between his left forearm and his tunic as he climbed the ladder. It felt first like a warm puppy, then like the quiet beginnings of torture. On the main deck again, the agent paused and gripped his amphora by the ears, just as the ballista fired with a crack like a horse's thigh breaking.

Perennius and everyone else on the Eagle's deck turned to mark the flight of the bolt. Its steel head and two bronze fins all glittered in the sun. Though the missile did not rotate, it quivered in the air on its long axis with a busy attraction that belied its purpose. The bolt's flat arc seemed to peak some two hundred and fifty paces away. It dropped into the sea at a much steeper angle than it had risen, still well short of the pirate vessel. The shot had been perfectly aligned, however, and there was a pause in the bellowed threats from the Germans.

You may win this, boys, thought the agent. But there'll be a few of you well and truly fucked before it's over.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The young courier and the two seamen he had coopted as ballista crewmen were alone atop the fighting tower. While the sailors cranked furiously on opposite sides of the cocking windlass, Gaius was readjusting the second bolt by straightening a fin crimped in storage. He greeted with a glance and a curse the oil jar which Longidienus proffered him. "No, take it, Gaius!" Perennius called. "And take this too till I get up."

The younger Illyrian looked up again, frowning beneath the rim of his helmet. He did not retort to the voice he knew so well. Gaius bent to take the amphora, lifting it with greater ease than the Marine had but without the hysterical abandon of the agent. The jar was stoppered, but it was not sealed with wax. Yellowish, low-quality olive oil sloshed around the plug and seeped down the side of the jar like a slip on the glaze. "Set it on its side," the agent directed. "We don't need much, it can run if it likes. But don't let this bastard fall - " He handed up the pot with the fire.

The mechanism of the ballista clacked. One of the sailors cried, "It's ready, sir." The sailor's enthusiasm took Perennius aback as he scrambled up the short ladder to the tower. It was beyond the agent's comprehension how Gaius had managed to gain immediate obedience, much less cheerful cooperation, from the sailors in such dangerous, unfamiliar duty. The only sudden emotion Perennius had ever been able to instill in strangers was fear; and he was far too intelligent to think that fear was a basis for getting anything difficult done well. There was a great future opening for Gaius if he wanted it - and if anyone on the Eagle could measure his future in more than minutes.

Gaius shot a worried glance at the oncoming pirates, then looked back to his friend. "Aulus," he said as the agent swung a leg over the low parapet, "I need to load the ballis—"

Both Perennius' edged weapons lay on the deck in their scabbards. He gripped the hem of his linen tunic with both hands and tore it through in a single motion. Gaius stared in amazement as his protector ripped a circuit a hand's breadth wide from the bottom of his garment. "Iron won't stop enough of them, my friend," muttered the agent. "Like wasps - but we'll burn their fucking hive!"

Oil from the leaking jar pooled along the parapet. Perennius tossed the linen in the pool to soak. He took the other pot from Gaius, whose face was beginning to show comprehension in place of concern. "Cut that cloth," the agent directed as he flicked away the slotted lid. "Tie half around an arrow and give the rest to me."

The coals were a nest of hardwood banked carefully on a bed of sand. Perennius took the strip of oily linen from Gaius and dangled it into the pot so that one dripping corner blackened the ash it touched in the very center. The agent blew; a firm, even flow rather than a fierce pulse that would have sent cinders flying and cooled the flame it was meant to raise. His reward was the tongue of fire that ran up the edge of the cloth. The flame was yellow and smoky without the rush that naphtha or pitch could have offered; but it was what they had, and it would serve.

With the oily cloth afire within, Perennius set down the amphora without fear that the sand would shift and smother the coals. "Light that," he said, nodding to the bolt Gaius held with the linen knotted just behind the head, "and send it to the bastards." He tore more of his tunic's skirt away. Gaius obeyed, grinning like a fiend. The bolt thunked into the trough of the ballista. Its band of cloth now trailed smoke from a rind of flame. Gaius

knelt, sighted between the vertical baulks of wood to either side of the trough, and loosed.

Because Perennius was behind the ballista, its bolt had little apparent motion to him. The missile lifted. It was a glitter against the pirates' sail and a black dot in the sky as it rose above the target. At the peak of its arc, the bolt blurred in a furious yaw, caused probably by the tail of linen tied to its shaft. A dot again after its momentary instability, the missile plunged. For a moment, the guttural bellowing from the pirate craft dissolved into less threatening sounds. A cheer broke out on the Eagle's deck.

A German had raised his shield to receive the missile. His face was a sunburned blur amid flowing blond beard and hair. The press of his fellows in the bow might have prevented him from ducking away even if he had been willing to show fear. The five-pound bolt, rather a short javelin than an arrow in weight, snapped through the wicker shield and the man who bore it before it crunched into the pelvis of a pirate in the second rank. The men crashed backwards, pinned together in a tangle of limbs flailing spasmodically like those of a spider on a knife point.

Perennius did not cheer with the others. The rag had been stripped on impact and lay as a black smear on the face of the wicker shield. That was not serious. Luck might send a later bolt into the more flammable target. But the agent had seen that the snap of the ballista's acceleration had snuffed the flame out even as the bolt sailed from its trough.

Gaius hooted with glee as he tied more linen around the shaft of the next missile. The fact of the whole plan's failure had been lost in the young man's delight at killing two of the enemy. "Half-cock on the next one, Gaius," the agent ordered as he opened his own pouch. "Don't draw the string all the way."

"Blazes, Aulus!" the courier cried. His normal deference to his protector was lost in the present rush of hormones. "It won't get there if we don't cock it!"

"God strike you for a fool!" Perennius roared back. "It doesn't matter if it gets there if the bloody fire goes out in the air!"

Shocked back into the agent's reality, Gaius spun and passed the order to the seamen on the windlass.

The captain's strategy of getting past with both pirate vessels on the port side had clearly failed. The nearer of the pirates, now closing on the liburnian with a rush, had already worked to starboard. The Eagle was in theory caught between her opponents. In fact, however, the separation between one German vessel and the other had increased as they raced for their prey. The further pirate had not worked to windward with anything like the finesse of her consort. She was now the better part of a mile distant. That at least permitted the Eagle to engage the nearer opponent alone; though Perennius was under no illusions as to his ability to beat off a hundred heavily-armed Germans with the force at his disposal.

Now that the direction of the attack was more or less certain, Sestius led his half-section forward to join Longidienus and the other Marines. Perennius noticed two seamen wearing loin clouts and carrying pikes had joined the Marines. Most of the deck crew had disappeared below. Leonidas held his post in the stern. The captain had belted on a sword. A pair of his men still gripped the tiller behind them. The Eagle was as ready as she would ever be.

There was one more datum on the credit side. No short, cowled figure had appeared among the barbarians screaming on the pirates' deck. For now, the Eagle had only men to deal with. Bad as that might be, Perennius found it at least better than the alternative.

"Had a pair of these, mule-drawn, in our troop," said Gaius to the stock of the ballista as he crouched behind it. "Used them at Arlate, though we didn't engage ourselves. ..." Perennius had not wondered at or even given thanks for his protege's unexpected competence with the crew-served weapon. Time enough for that if they got out of what was coming.

After they got out of it.

The ballista was not simply a large bow mounted cross-

wise in a stock. The arms holding the string were separate, stiff billets of wood, each about thirty inches long. The butt of either arm was thrust into a skein made from the neck sinews of draft oxen. The skeins had been wrenched to the greatest torsion possible in their heavy frame. Only then were the arms drawn back against that stress by the cocking windlass. The bow string itself was of horsehair and an inch in diameter; nothing lighter could transfer the energy of even a rather small piece of torsion artillery to its missile.

With the trough elevated to 45° and the cord drawn only half the three feet of travel possible, Gaius sent a second flaming bolt into the sky. Its arc was clean and perfect from the point it leapt from the weapon to its hiss on plunging into a wave the length of a man short of the pirates' deck. Groans from the Marines mingled with raucous cheers from the Germans; but there was a pool of yellow flame, oil burning on the water, for an instant before the cutwater scattered it.

"Load another," the agent said in grim triumph. "We've got them now!" And he dropped a bullet into the cup of his own sling.

Several of the Germans were shooting arrows into the sea with self bows - bows which depended on the tension of a single staff of wood to power their missiles. The composite bows of the horse lords of Scythia and Mesopotamia were far more effective weapons. Perennius would not, however, have traded the sling he held for even one of those fine recurved bows and the skill to use it.

The sling was marvellously compact in comparison to any other missile weapon save a hand-flung rock. There was a short wooden grip, a leather pocket for the bullet, and two silken cords a yard long to provide leverage. Perennius used silk cords because they were strong and because they were not affected by the damp. In a downpour, leather stretched and the sinew and horn laminations of composite bows could separate from the wooden core. The silken sling was affected only to the extent that rain made its user uncomfortable; and that, for Aulus Perennius in a killing mood, was not at all.

Now the agent grinned, sighted, and snapped the sling around his head in a single 360° arc. He released the free cord while still holding the wooden handgrip. The bullet slashed out over the ballista and the two startled seamen cocking it. Six hundred feet away, a German died as two ounces of lead crushed his skull. Perennius' mouth was still set in humorless curve of an axe-edge. He set another bullet in the pocket and resumed the business of slaughter.

The sling would throw anything within reason, including clay balls that would shatter and could not be thrown back. Pebbles would do in default of prepared ammunition. Perennius preferred almond-shaped bullets of lead. Their density carried them further through the air than bulkier missiles, and their double points could punch through the armor of cataphract horsemen at shorter ranges. The ammunition the agent had brought to his pouch had the word "Strike!" cast in the side of each bullet. At worst, the hope expressed by some armorer did not make the bullets less effective, for they struck like deadly hail as the vessels closed.

The ship-jarring thud of seventy-two oars striking their locks in attempted unison had been a part of existence since the pirates were sighted. Now the sound ceased. It was replaced by a continuing clatter and the hiss of the liburnian's hull cleaving the water on sail-power and momentum. Gaius cursed as his forehead bumped the ballista he was sighting. Perennius ignored the change except to shift his bracing foot as he shot, then shot again.

The agent's whole upper body, not just the strength of his arms, was behind the snap of each bullet. It was for that reason that Perennius could not wear armor, though he knew as well as anyone that he would be the target of every German archer when they realized what he was doing. A chieftain as gray and shaggy as his wolf-skin cape suddenly squawked and pitched forward, under the bows of his own ship. A bullet had broken his shin. A moment later, the man who had pushed into the victim's place collapsed in turn. A lozenge-shaped fleck had appeared in the weathered surface of his shield. The German did not cry out as he died. The bullet had lodged in his diaphragm after punching through his lindenwood buckler.

Perennius had aiming points, but for now he was not really trying to choose his targets. The range and relative motion of the ships would have made it difficult to snipe at individuals - though it was a thing he would have managed, trust the gods and his own trained eye, if one of the chitinous Guardians had shown itself with the pirates. Now there was no need to be choosy. The Germans were clustered too thickly to miss. A round glanced from the bronze helm of one and into the throat of the fellow screeching just behind him. Both Germans fell in a confused tangle of limbs and weapons. One pirate was much the same as another, with the champions and bare-chested mad-men of the front rank more likely as more worthy victims.

An arrow with a barbed iron head thumped the parapet of the tower. An inch higher and it would have been in the agent's knee. The archer was a naked man who squatted amidships near the beitass, the pole which stiffened the forward leech of the sail. Perennius ignored him as he ignored the handful of other archers. Statistically, they were not a serious threat; and there was no way to get through the next minutes save by trusting Fortune and the best chances offered.

The short German bows were unlikely to disable any of the armored Marines if they hit, and accurate archery from shipboard was almost impossible anyway. Waves and fluctuations in the breeze kept moving vessels trembling up and down even in calm seas. That did not affect a slinger, since the bullet would hold the plane of its arc no matter what the ship did in the instant between aim and release. Perennius could not have called the gyroscopic effect by name, but he used its results like any good empiricist. A one-inch twitch in the arrowhead meant the shot missed by a man's height at a hundred feet - that was if it had been properly aimed in the first place. Perennius had the gravest regard for the rush of a hundred German swordsmen; but their archers, like thirst, were simply a factor that had to be ignored in battle.

It was something of the same problem that caused Gaius to overshoot his intended target. He had aimed for the pirate steersman, in the stern with two other men. A swell threw the missile high, so that it should have cleared them by thirty feet - but Fortune favors the bold. The blazing arrow thudded through the sail and into the top of the mast. The bolt and its result were lost to almost the entire companies of both ships as they prepared to come to grips.

At the coxswain's order, the Eagle's rowers had stopped stroking and had attempted to draw their oars in through the ports. It was an operation the men performed every night and during intervals of the day when their stroke was not called for. In those cases, however, there was leisure to pull one oar in at a time and to take care that the handles cleared the men and benches across the rowing chamber. There was neither time nor calm now. The men on deck feared the foaming, furious Germans. The oarsmen were crowded together with no view but a flash of sea through their ports, even that occluded by the runnels of sweat in their eyes. Drowning, fire, missiles rained down on them through the ventilators - every man could feel his own terror approach through the swimming blackness. When through the fog of adrenalin and fatigue poisons they received the order to secure oars simultaneously, they obeyed; but they obeyed in anarchic panic.

The Eagle slowed as its oars ceased their stroke. In the rowing chamber, men fell as oar-butts slammed their temples. The ship itself resounded with the battering of oars into benches; sometimes the same oar repeatedly, as a terror-blinded seaman kept jerking against immovable timber instead of angling his shaft an inch to one side or the other to clear. There was no one on deck to drop the yard and sail. Leonidas could only hope that the leverage of the high-hung weight would not be enough to snap the mast and bury the Eagle's fighting complement in a tangle of sail and cordage. No one else aboard knew or remembered to care.

The German steerman and the pair of men with him in the stern were darker and more squat that the general run of the pirates - Herulians among Goths. None of the three were armed at the moment, though their spears and shields were laid against the low gunwale beside them.

The man at the oar snouted. His two companions tugged at the windlass that raised and lowered their own sail.

Perennius sighted over the mass of Germans now almost below him. He shot the steersman in the chest.

The Herulian straightened with a cry. He fell forward, across one of the men who had just unblocked the windlass. The yard clattered down in a rush. The belly of the sail flapped, then crumpled flaccidly, as the wind had its will. The pirates had been making only a knot or two into the wind. Their mass and headway were too slight to keep their bow from swinging slightly as the wind took them aback. The closing impact was therefore the two knots driven by the Eagle's sail alone. It was still awesome.

The liburnian displaced some eighty tons; the pirate vessel perhaps half that. The crews alone massed ten tons apiece. All of that kinetic energy had to be absorbed by the hulls as the ships ground together, starboard to starboard. In the Eagle's rowing chamber, that meant death and maiming despite the best efforts of the coxswain and his assistant.

The oars could not be fully withdrawn, but with care all but the blade-tips could have been sheltered within the hull and outrigger. There had not been time for care. Now the pirates' cutwater slammed along the side of the liburnian, catching every oar that still projected. The oar-looms turned into flails within the rowing chamber. The ashen oars broke, but more limbs and bodies broke also. Men on deck heard a screaming like that of pigs in an abattoir. Twelve feet of oar-shaft flipped up, dislodging a ventilator grate.

It was small consolation to the victims that something similar was happening to the pirates.

The skill of the Herulian seamen was no more in doubt than was the courage of the Gothic berserkers pressing forward in the bow. The Eagle was probably the first oared warship the pirates had tackled, however, and that led to a misjudgment. No one on the pirate ship was prepared to see the oar-blades rise into a chest-high obstruction as the ships swept together. Men waiting to board either ducked or were struck down by blades and shafts splintered on the cutwater. Leonidas' exercise had been a protective one, intended to save his oars and rowers. Because the liburnian had twice the pirate vessel's height above the water, the half-effective defensive move proved to be a shattering offensive weapon.

Alone, it was not enough. A German with naked, tattooed limbs hurled the first grappling iron aboard even as an oar struck him down. There were three more irons clawing the Eagle's foredeck and outrigger before the ships ground to a complete halt. Marines staggered as their deck lurched and the liburnian's sail thrust against the combined mass. Howling with glee, pirates began scrambling over writhing comrades and up the oars.

"Let's get the bastards!" Gaius shouted. He drew his long cavalry sword with a flourish. The young Illyrian leaped down from the tower. His waist-length dress cloak flared behind him like a crimson membrane. To Perennius' utter amazement, the two seamen snatched up ballista bolts and followed Gaius to the deck. If they had stayed where they were and thrown the bolts, they might have been of use. Charismatic leadership did not seem to confer tactical skills when it suppressed the instincts of naked men to run from armored attackers.

Well, Aulus Perennius might not be able to get a sailor to follow him into a whorehouse, much less a battle, but he didn't need anyone to teach him his present business either.

More than half the Marines surged forward to meet the Germans. Only one of the scratch force turned and jumped down the forehatch. It was a better percentage than the agent would have guessed. He had no time for the melee, because the Herulians in the stern had noticed the smoke puffing from the ends of their loose-folded sail.

The ballista bolt had been snatched from the mast by the weight of the yard and sail. Hidden but not suffocated, the oily rag had ignited the sail. Perennius had not expected his makeshift fire-arrows to do serious damage. He had hoped for a diversion which, had it occurred early enough, might have permitted the liburnian to run past the pirates as Leonidas had planned to do. Perennius had his diversion now, though it was probably too late.

One of the Herulians snatched up the bucket which lay

in the shallow bailing well aft. He turned and the sling bullet took him on the point of his hip. A trifle low, but the angle was tricky . . . and it would serve for the time, as the man bled and screamed and tried with both hands to compress the shattered bone into unity.

A spear thrust at the agent over the tower parapet. Perennius skipped back, putting the frame of the ballista between himself and the German who wanted his life. The remaining Herulian amidships was the only one of the pirates who seemed to retain an interest in his own ship. He was short-gripping his spear to probe at the sail with the point in an attempt to find the source of the smoke.

"Fire, you donkey-fuckers!" Perennius shouted, hoping Germans from the Danube migrations could understand the dialect he had picked up on the Rhine. "Your ship's burning!" He shot the Herulian seaman through the center of his boiled-leather breast-plate, just as a Goth stabbed the agent from behind in the right thigh.

There had been a brief struggle as Marines on the catwalk tried to throw back the pirates climbing aboard. The Germans were handicapped by their need to scramble up oar-shafts with their shields slung and a hand for their spears. They had both numbers and fury, however. The angle gave them an unexpected advantage as well. The German spears tended to be longer than the eight-foot javelins issued to the Marines. When the pirates thrust up from their deck or a shifting perch among the cars, their points passed below the Roman shields. Three Marines crashed down with their calves pierced before the rest hopped back onto the deck proper. Germans leaped after them, pushing the defenders back further by sheer weight.

Perennius threw himself forward with a cry. The weapon that had pierced his leg was a poor grade of iron and not even particularly sharp. It had the strength of a hulking, two-hundred-and-fifty pound pirate behind it, however. Blood leaped after the black iron as the agent drew himself off the point. The pirate grunted and raised his weapon to finish the job.

Flat-footed on deck, the Goth was as tall as the fighting tower. To thrust over the parapet, he had to raise his spear overhead with both hands, but that awkwardness was slight protection to Perennius. The German wore silvered chain mail, but his head was bare. His blond hair was long. It was gathered on the left side by a knot close to the German's scalp, so that it streamed like a horse's tail past his shoulder.

The agent's sword lay somewhere on deck. His shield was packed in the cabin with his body armor. With a bullet in its cup, the sling would have been an effective flail even though the range was too short for normal use. And any thought of further retreat ended with the crunch of iron against the mechanism of the ballista behind him. The German who had driven Perennius to the back of the tower had not forgotten the slinger either.

If Perennius jumped forward, the Goth would spit him on the shaft of his rising spear - but the agent might get close enough to kick the bastard's brains out. Perennius tensed, and the Goth tensed, and the boat-pike Calvus swung like a flail dished in the side of the pirate's skull.

Sabellia and Calvus had appeared around the swollen belly of the sail. They held pikes from the rack on the mast. The Gallic woman was screeching as she thrust at another pirate around the corner of the tower. Her pike thumped his breast plate, leaving a bright streak on the bronze disks and a scar on the leather backing when it skidded off. The point did not penetrate.

The strength required to swing the full length of a fourteen-foot pike was amazing even by the standards Calvus had already demonstrated, but it was also an absurdly awkward way to use the thrusting weapon. The traveller must have been watching Sabellia even as he clubbed down the Goth. He shifted his grip. He was still holding the pike well behind its point of balance. The pirate Sabellia had struck now raised his shield and stepped forward again. The long, round-tipped sword in his right hand was poised for an overhand cut.

Perennius held the free end of his sling and flipped the handle-weighted length of it down to entangle the German's sword wrist. Calvus lunged, ramming his pike through the shield, the startled pirate, and an inch or more of the

fighting tower beside. The crackle of wood and bones was as sharp as nearby lightning.

Perennius sprang down. His right leg collapsed as he had expected, but it held him again when he thrust himself back off the deck with both hands. The Goth pinned to the tower's planking was thrashing. His arms and legs hammered the wood as all his muscles retracted simultaneously, relaxed, and clamped again. The whites of his eyes had rotated up. His sword dropped beside him. The agent snatched the German-made weapon, careful to keep his right leg straight as he bent over.

Sestius and his Marines held a surprisingly solid line between the fighting tower and the mast. Gaius was still on his feet, the agent saw with relief. The young Illyrian stood in the center of the fight, everything a commander should be with his bright armor and his long, bloody sword. The pirates had so awkward a path to board that their numbers could not tell fully. Beyond that difficulty, it was clear that the strength and enthusiasm of the men who remained to board the liburnian was less than that of the individuals in the first wave.

The German leader, if he were still alive, had shown as little of generalship as had Perennius himself. Unlike the Imperial agent, the mixed force of Germans had no subordinate officers to make up for defects in command - the way Gaius, Sestius, and Leonidas on the poop had done. Only two Goths had circled the fighting tower instead of charging straight for the line of Marines. A serious attempt - and one aimed at the shieldless backs of the Marines instead of the galling slinger on the tower - would have ended all resistance on the liburnian's deck in a minute or less. Now the ignored path around the flank was Perennius' to exploit - as point man and not as commander, of course.

Sabellia was trying to turn and face the main German threat. Sestius himself held the tower end of the Marine line. The Gallic woman clearly wanted to be beside her lover. She was not large even for her sex, however. Her pike weighed over twenty pounds and was very clumsy besides. When Sabellia tried to raise the shaft and turn, the pike head fouled one of the forestays of the mast.

Calvus was trying to withdraw his own weapon. When he tugged backward, the point squealed out of the tower. The Goth remained hopelessly impaled. Clearing that pike was obviously a task for whoever survived the battle. To the agent's amazement, the traveller continued to jerk at the shaft as if he could somehow overcome the friction of perforated wood, bronze, and bone with nothing more than the corpse's mass to hold against his tugging.

"Blazes!" screamed the agent. "Take hers and come along with me!" For all that Calvus seemed genuinely dim-witted about practical things, his demonstrated strength was too obvious an asset now to be neglected. Sabellia's instincts and courage were all that Perennius could have hoped for at his back - but a man who could drive a pike like a ballista bolt was utterly beyond a soldier's hopes.

There was a splotch on the ragged edge of the agent's tunic. The wound oozed, however, with none of the fierce arterial spurting that would have meant the agent's death by now. It made him weaker and slower, but he was Aulus Perennius. When a black-bearded German faced him with a shout at the starboard side of the tower, Perennius cut him down. The blow would have decapitated the German if the sword-edge had been up to the job.

The confusion on the pirate vessel itself was suddenly more than raucous blood-lust. Genuine flames amidships were rolling clouds of smoke as white as steam out of the crumpled sail. Half the men still aboard the shallow vessel were either trying to fight the fire or were shouting at it in pointless terror instead of trying to board the Eagle.

Perennius saw a chance and took it. The two ships were rotating slowly about their common center. In a few minutes, the Eagle would be taken aback, her untended sail fluttering back against her mast as the combined momentum of the vessels torqued her into the wind. At the moment, however, the liburnian's canvas and bluff side were downwind of the pirates. If the ships had not

been linked by the grappling lines, they would already have begun drifting apart.

And there were only two lines still fastened.

The axe-wielding Herulian who had been facing Sestius danced back, aiming a cut and a curse at the Roman agent who had just appeared on his right flank. Perennius ducked his upper body away from the blow. He made no attempt to parry the heavier weapon with his sword. More surprisingly to anyone who had seen Perennius fight before, the squat Illyrian did not exploit the German's loss of balance. The fellow stood with his shield wide to the left fronting Sestius. His axe pulled the right side of his body around to follow his backhand blow.

The Herulian was not the most important target. Perennius squatted and cut at the horsehair rope reeved through the shaft of the nearest grapnel. His sword tore chips from the edge of the runway which acted as his chopping block. The wound in Perennius' thigh burned and his leg threatened to buckle, but he could not have reached the hawser without bending at the knees.

A Goth clung to the rope as his feet slid on the shaft of the oar he was trying to climb. He screamed and tried to thrust his spear at the agent left-handed. To the other side, the Herulian with the axe cried out also. Sestius had used the diversion to pin his opponent's knees together by thrusting below the German's wicker shield. The Herulian fell backward as the government-issue spear tore through ligaments and the porous ends of the leg bones. The Herulian might still have swung at Sestius' ankles while the centurion drew his sword, but Sabellia slipped past her lover with something bright in her hand. As Perennius had suspected before, the finger-length blade of her knife was long enough to let out all a man's blood through his throat.

Oarsmen were fighting their way onto the deck by both hatches and through the ventilator whose grating had been lifted by the initial shock. If the sailors had been armed and trained, their numbers would have been decisive. As it was, their terror was likely to demoralize the Marines who had been holding steadily despite their losses. Flight was obvious suicide, but the instincts of battle are housed far deeper in a man's brain than is the intellect which seeks to direct them. Perennius cursed and cut again. Both ends frayed into anemone-tufts of horsehair as the hawser sprang apart under tension. The Goth's despairing spear-thrust nocked the side of the Eagle as the man himself hit the water. He was dragged instantly to his death by his equipment and his inability to swim.

The agent levered himself to his feet, using the Gothic sword as a crutch. The blade bowed under his weight. It did not spring back when he lifted its point from the wood.

There was no way this side of Hell that Perennius could reach the remaining grappling line. It was fast in the outrigger, twenty feet aft of where he stood. Already fresh Germans boarding the Eagle were running toward the agent instead of joining the rank that faced the Marines.

The grapnel Perennius had cut free lay on the deck before him. The released tension of its line had sprung free the one of its three hooks which had been embedded in the liburnian's deck coaming. The agent thrust the point of his sword under a hook and flipped the iron up into his left hand. He could not afford to bend over. Perennius' right thigh was spasming even though he was trying to keep his weight off it. "Cut the other line!" he shouted in Greek. He brandished the grapnel, holding it by its eighteen-inch shaft as an explanation and a way to call attention to himself in the tumult.

Wailing, bloody oarsmen forced their way up from the chaos in the rowing chamber. Some of them were even throwing themselves over the port side, though they could be only a brief salvation even for those who could swim. "We've got to separate the ships!" shrieked Perennius in a hopeless attempt to be heard above their clamor.

The Goth who rushed Perennius along the outrigger's runway wore a helmet of silvered iron. Its fixed visor flared over his brow like the bill of a Celtic woman's bonnet. There was nothing feminine about his long sword or the strength with which he cut at the agent's torso with it.

Perennius interposed the grappling iron as if it were a

buckler. The claws were thumb-thick and forged from metal as good as that in the Goth's sword. Sparks flew from both objects. The shock to Perennius' left arm was severe, but the two feet of greater leverage almost tore the quivering sword from the Goth's hand.

The agent tried to thrust at his opponent. His bent blade and the weakness of the leg that should have carried him made the attack more of a stumble. The German skipped back anyway, disconcerted by his numb sword-hand. As the pirate did so, the deck lurched and he lost his footing. Screaming, he fell backward onto the oar-blades. Despite the desperate clutching of his hands, the Goth slipped off and went head-first into the sea.

Perennius went down also. The wind blew a pall of smoke from the other vessel. It reeked of leather and wet wool. Out of it came another German with his metal-shod shield raised and his spear poised to stab the kneeling agent.

There was nothing wrong with Perennius' right arm. He hurled his sword against the warrior's trousered shins. The weapon clanged and cut. The pirate gave a yelp and pitched headlong. His helmet fell off and he dropped his shield to scrabble at the deck coaming with his left hand.

Perennius hit him on the temple with the grappling iron. The German's legs relaxed, but there was still life in his arms until the agent struck twice more. The body slid sideways off the runway, as the other had done before it.

Blazes, there was open water between the ships!

A freak of the breeze sucked away the bitter smoke for the moment. The ships had lain parallel with their starboard bows interlocked. Now there was a broad V of water between the liburnian's bow and the cutwater of the pirate vessel. There was still a grappling line snubbed to the Eagle. Even as Perennius stared, the hooks of that iron tore free. They took with them a foot of the deck coaming. The Eagle lurched again. Without the drag of the smaller ship, the wind was already starting to swing her head to leeward.

The agent risked a glance over his shoulder. Behind him, Calvus was straightening. The tall man held the boat-pike near the butt as he twitched its head free of the pirate's hull planking.

The traveller had just pushed the two ships apart single-handedly.

The Eagle's defenders could not see what had happened. The roar of despair on their own vessel was enough to cause the pirates who had boarded already to glance around. There were less than a dozen of them. The Marines' tight ranks and full armor had made them dangerous opponents when there was nowhere for them to run.

Perennius grabbed a fallen spear to replace the sword which had splashed over the side. He was still on his knees. "Get'em from behind with your pike!" he cried to Calvus, but when he looked around he saw that the tall man was stiff in his trance state.

The line of Germans broke from the flank nearest Perennius and his companion.

It was as sudden and progressive as cloth ripping under tension. A red-bearded pirate flung the spear with which he had been sparring with Sestius. It clanged on the centurion's shield boss. The German dropped his own shield and ran. He launched himself from the deck of the liburnian and into the waist of his own vessel despite the widening gap that separated them. Behind him came his companions.

The pirates broke so suddenly that the exhausted Marines had no time to pursue. Gaius alone followed them. The courier had a deep cut on his left shoulder and the light of battle in his eyes. Blood rippled into droplets from the point of his long sword as he brought it around in a final arc. A Herulian with a wolf-skin kirtle screamed as the Roman blade severed one heel even as he threw himself overboard. In the water, men drowned or splashed to hand-holds on the pirate ship's gunwale.

And there were no pirates alive on the Eagle.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Perennius was dizzy, sick with blood loss and reaction. He tried to rise but found that even holding himself on knees and knuckles required all his concentration until the moment of vertigo had passed. God of Morning, he thought with his eyes closed. Let your servant behold you once again. But it was now late in the afternoon, and the second pirate vessel was luffing toward them with men at her rail.

Hell, he was never very good at resting anyway, the agent thought. He rose carefully. Calvus' hands were at his shoulder and wounded thigh. Their dry warmth offered more comfort than the burden they took from Perennius' own muscles.

The Eagle was not entirely clear of the first pirate vessel, for that matter. The survivors of that smoldering craft seemed as disinterested in continuing the fight as were those standing in the carnage of the liburnian's deck. Neither ship was under control. Because the Eagle's sail was set and her sides were higher than those of the pirate craft, she was drifting downwind faster than the Germans were. That was not going to be sufficient so long as the liburnian shared the sea with an undamaged shipful of pirates.

The captain, Leonidas, was obviously aware of that. He was shouting at the mate. That officer in turn was holding a pair of seamen and actually placing their hands on the shroud he wanted trimmed. Both sailors were blood-spattered and slack-faced. Perennius recognized one of them from the ballista crew. No wonder the mate was having difficulty raising him out of shock. A wonder that the man had survived at all, the way Gaius had rushed them into the melee.

Calvus was bandaging Perennius' thigh. The tall man was using a length of wool and a jeweled brooch that the agent had last seen fastening the cloak of a Goth he had killed. The wool provided absorption and a compress, all you could do while you waited to see whether the wound festered and killed you. ... "Can you make the winds blow the way you want?" Perennius asked. He rotated the spear in his hand so that its iron ferule rapped the bloody deck.

The traveller straightened. "No," he said. He pointed at the bandage, partly visible beneath the torn edge of the agent's tunic. "It will hurt as it heals, and there'll be the usual stiffness," he said. "But no infection."

All over the deck, men were sorting themselves out. Leonidas had disappeared down the after hatch. Missing seamen were beginning to reappear on deck for their officers to put to work. Speaking harshly under the rein that kept him from rushing back to present needs himself, the agent demanded, "How did you separate us from the pirates?" He waved at the shallow, wallowing craft which was now well astern of the Eagle. "How?"

"You said we had to loose ourselves from them," the tall man said simply. "I could not have reached the line without being killed myself, but I could push the ships apart with my pike. Eventually the line would give or the hooks would pull out." Calvus' tongue touched his lips in a gesture of hesitation which Perennius did not remember the traveller showing in the past. "That meant that I could not help you fight, but . . . you need little help in that."

Perennius closed his eyes, then opened them to snarl with a frustration directed against the world, "Could you lift this fucking ship? Could you do that?"

"No, Aulus Perennius," the traveller said.

The agent spun on his left heel. "Let's see what we've got left to kill the next hundred with," he said.

"Aulus!" shouted the courier when he noticed the agent,

Gods above, we massacred them! Gaius enthusiasm was as natural as it was premature. He had not yet learned the lesson that it does not matter in war how well you fight, but only whether or not you win. The Eagle had fought very well indeed; but Perennius' mind, unlike his protege's, was on the unscathed company of pirates rather than on those whose blood painted the liburnian's foredeck.

Gaius waved his sword with an abandon that showed he had forgotten it. Blood had dried on its point and edges and was streaked darkly across the flats of the blade as well. Perennius stepped to the younger man and grasped his sword wrist. "Clean your equipment, soldier!" he ordered harshly. Gaius' present euphoria was as incapacitating as the blubbering despair which would follow it if the agent did not shock him back to reality at once. They all needed the courier's demonstrated charisma if they were to survive.

The wound on Gaius' shoulder was not as serious as the agent had feared. The segmented body armor had sleeves and a skirt of studded leather straps. A blow had severed two of the straps, but the cut beneath the young man's bloody tunic was short and shallow. There was no grating of bone ends when Perennius probed it firmly.

"Yes sir!" Gaius said. He braced to attention despite the twinge as the squat agent tested his shoulder.

Perennius grinned like a shark as he turned to Sestius and the Marines. Gods! but the kid was good. Men would follow him to Hell!

Men had. The body immediately underfoot was that of the other ballista crewman. A spear had spilled several feet of intestines from his unprotected body.

Longidienus was dead. An arrow, of all things, through the throat. Sestius had been the real commander of the detachment ever since the first day on board, however. As expected, the centurion was readying his troops for the next fight with professional calm. If he did not demonstrate the verve that young Gaius had, it was because he knew as well as Perennius did how slight their chances of survival were.

Sestius broke off a discussion with the man whose calf he was bandaging when he saw the agent approaching.

"Sir," he said, the Cilician accent polished out of his voice by fifteen years of Army. "Four dead, four may as well be. . . ."He and Perennius glanced together at a gray-faced Marine with a broken spear-shaft showing just below the lower lip of his cuirass. "Three that'll be all right unless they get time for the wounds to stiffen up, which I don't guess they will." He squeezed the wrist of the man he was bandaging. "Next!"

"Perennius, are you all right?" Sabellia asked, rising from behind the centurion's armored bulk. She flipped to the deck the arrow she had just forced out of a sailor's biceps point-first so that the barbs would not tear the flesh even wider. The woman's arms were bloody to the elbows. Perennius knew that not all the gore resulted from the medical work she was doing at the moment.

"Huh?" the agent said. Sabellia was bent down again with a water-dripping compress before he remembered his wounded thigh. "Blazes, I'll live," he added with a certainty he could not have offered had he thought about the words. "Sestius, get the casualties stripped, arms and armor collected, and a seaman behind every goddam point or edge of this ship. If they're going to run up on deck screaming, they can damned well stay and soak up an arrow that might waste somebody useful otherwise."

The man whose arm Sabellia was binding looked up in horror. He was obviously one of the oarsmen who had leaped up on deck just in time to stop a missile.

"Go on, leave the wounded," Perennius growled to his centurion. "She can handle the rest." Sabellia lifted her eyes. They were large and dark, and they covered any emotion the woman might have felt the way straw can momentarily cover a fire it is flung on.

The Eagle's sluggish wake bobbed with flotsam: bodies, stripped and flung over the side. They would float until their lungs filled or the gulls, wheeling and screaming above, pecked away enough of the soft parts that the rest sank for the bottom-feeding eels. Further off, beyond even the smudgy pall of the vessel they had fought, were the heads of men whose arms still splashed to stave off drowning. The ones still alive in the water would be those who had leaped in unburdened by equipment: oarsmen,

driven to panic in the liburnian's belly, Germans who threw away their arms and chose water over fire as a route to Hell. They had no value either as fighters or as hostages. No one on either side would spare a thought for them until long after they had lost their hand-holds on the waves.

But the second pirate ship had sheered slightly from its attempt to close with the Eagle. Perhaps the fact that the liburnian suddenly got under way again was primarily responsible for the change. Now the German craft was wearing around to her disabled consort. As Perennius squinted to see past the Eagle's high stern, blocks rattled and the pirates' sail dropped smoothly.

"Will they let us go now?" Calvus asked in his usual tone of unconcern.

"Can you make them let us go?" the agent asked.

The tall man dipped his head. "No," he said, "at this distance - " already a quarter mile separated the hunters from their prey - "I can't affect anyone except my own kind."

"Then they'll be back," Perennius said grimly. "They want to know what happened . . . maybe take aboard some of the able-bodied men, that's all they're doing. But they haven't forgotten us, and unless our rowers are in better shape than I think they are, they've got plenty of daylight to catch us in." He paused, looking at Calvus with an expression of rueful joy. "You know," he said, "they gave us an old cow . . . but she gored a few Germans, didn't she? I keep thinking that the Empire . . . Ah, screw it, let's find Leonidas and see if he's got any better ideas than I do."

From the sea astern came the squealing of a windlass. The Germans were raising their sails again. The mechanical sound formed a descant to the pirates' hoarse shouting.

The Tarantine captain rose from the aft ladder as Perennius approached. During brief glimpses caught while the fighting went on, the captain looked cool and aloof in his command chair. The agent had felt flashes of anger, irrational but real none the less when he was bathed with his own sweat and blood in the melee. Closer view provided a reassurance which Perennius needed emotionally if not on an intellectual level. Leonidas too was drenched in sweat, and there was a bubble of blood where he had bitten through his lip during the action. "Right?" he said sharply, turning to meet the agent.

Despite the fact that the battle was only half over, the anger which had flared earlier between the two men was gone. The tension which had fueled the earlier outbursts had burned away in the open fighting. Each of them was intelligent enough to have noted how the other handled his duties during the crisis. "We're doing what we can," the agent said simply. "The fire was a fluke. I doubt we'll fight them off a second time, even arming some of your seamen. What're the chances that you'll be able to run us clear?"

From below them came a human babble and the clash and rattle of wood. Injured men were coming up the hatchway. Some of them were slung like sides of meat if their own damaged limbs could not get them out of the way unaided.

"Fucking none," Leonidas said bleakly. "But we're trying, too. Getting the rowing chamber clear." There were splashes alongside as broken oars slid into the sea. There was no time to fit the replacements carried in the hold, but at least their burden and awkwardness could be disposed of. "Capenus'll have a stroke of some sort going any time now, but Fortune! That won't do more than add minutes, the shape the men and hardware is below. Fortune! But we tried."

"How will they approach us this time, Captain Leonidas?" asked Calvus as the two shorter men started to return glumly to tasks they viewed as hopeless.

The Tarantine's eyes glittered at what seemed now an interruption, but the question's own merit struck him. "Likely the same way. Our poop's high - " he rapped the bulkhead beside him with a palm as hard as a landsman's knuckles. "Can't board us by this. Their little boats aren't high enough to lay alongside, either. That they'll have learned from the first try." He grinned in fierce recollection. "Damned if the oars didn't lay out more of them than your lobsters on deck did - not to knock the way the Marines

fought, sir. . . . But they've got the legs to overhaul us, the shape we're in below decks. If they're smart, and if they're not too afraid of your ballista - " a nod to Perennius - "they'll lay along the starboard bow again, where there's the most length of hull without the oars to fend them away."

Oar blades curled into the water on either side. It was a ragged stroke with jolts like mallets knocking as shafts fouled one another, but it brought a cheer from the men on deck. Perennius could glimpse the second pirate ship now. It was nosing past the rising curve of the Eagle's poop at a distance. The Germans were standing off wide to starboard instead of closing directly on the stern of their prey. Little more than half the liburnian's oars were moving, given the damage to the oars and to the men who should have worked them. Besides that, the rowers must be exhausted from their earlier pull. Their second wind could not last long.

"I'd better go help Gaius with the ballista," the agent said abruptly. "We were lucky once." He turned.

"Wait," said Calvus, touching Perennius' arm. "Why don't we ram them this time?" he went on. His dark eyes held the Tarantine's.

Leonidas' rage was predictable and this time uncontrolled. "Listen, fishbrain, I told you why we don't ram! We - " Calvus raised his index finger in query. The captain's flowing recapitulation choked off, though Leonidas himself seemed puzzled at the fact.

"I understood what you said," the tall man agreed. Leonidas' eyes bulged. The agent watched Calvus with a care dictated by more than present words. "We will lose our mast and sail, and our own hull may very well be hopelessly damaged. While there were two pirate ships pursuing us, those were valid arguments against ramming. Are they now?"

"Dammit, I'm not going to sink my ship!" Leonidas shouted.

"Blazes!" Perennius shouted back, aware that they were drawing attention away from the pirates. "We'll sink ourselves, when the bastards drop us overboard, won't we? Do you think it's a joke, that they sacrifice prisoners to their sea gods? Or do you think they'll just turn us all loose when they've stripped the ship?"

The Tarantine's face worked as if he were forced to chew tar. "Pollux," he muttered, "but we can't stand to be boarded again, I know that. ..."

Calvus touched the captain's wrist. "You don't want to shatter a thing that is in your charge, a thing that's important to you," he said softly. "That's good. But there are times that we have to sacrifice things of greatest personal importance for the good of the race."

For the Empire, Perennius thought, though he was no longer certain that Calvus had the Empire in mind when he spoke. In any case, Leonidas licked at the blood on his lip and said, "All right, I'll do what I can." The captain smiled bitterly. "She's not much, you know," he said. "Wallows like a pig and maybe won't give us the angle we need as quick as we'll need it. But we'll do what we can. Fortune bless us."

This time Calvus did not intervene as Leonidas and the agent turned to their respective tasks.

"You didn't know anything about ships when you came aboard, did you?" Perennius asked quietly as he strode forward beside the tall man. "You didn't know a damned thing about fighting in that alley in Rome. Blazes, that's why I wanted you shut in the cabin, so you wouldn't get in the way. What's going on?"

Calvus smiled again. "Logic is the same, Aulus Perennius," he said, "whether the units are ships or game pieces. Or men, of course." It was a moment before he went on. The timbre of his voice was no longer quite the same. "The other, I think, concerns me more than it does you. The woman, Sabellia, said 'They'll never hold. Come on, there's spears at the mast,' . . . and I followed her. That shouldn't have happened. It wasn't what I was raised for." He looked down at the Illyrian. There was no frown on his calm face, but the agent was sure that the statement of concern was true.

"I'm glad you got involved. You saved my ass," Perennius said. He was trying to react to a problem which, as the traveller had suggested, he could not himself imagine. "All except my ass, I mean." The agent attempted a smile.

He was more nervous at the moment about a situation he did not understand than he was about the German pirates already drawing ahead of the Eagle. Perennius knew as well as any man how to deal with the Germans. The only question that remained was his ability to do so under the present circumstances. That would sort itself out very quickly.

"I'm glad for the results, my - companion," the tall man replied. "But when a tool begins to act in unexpected ways, one naturally becomes concerned that it may no longer be fit for the job for which it was forged."

"Tools!" the agent snorted as they joined the motley gang of armed men - and Bella, not to forget Bella - around the fighting tower.

"Aulus, the fucking ballista's out of action," Gaius said as he saw the agent. "Do we have a spare skein in one of the lockers? Fucking spear took three layers out of one of these!"

"All men are tools, Aulus Perennius," the traveller concluded softly. "The tools of Mankind."

"Sir, the coxswain won't give me any oarsmen," Sestius announced, "and I think he's grabbed everybody whole from the deck crew besides. I can arm some of his cast-offs for show - " the centurion's glance swept the deck amidships where oarsmen sent up with broken limbs had congregated. They knew they would get no sympathy except from each other. "Or I can go below and show him that your orders are to be obeyed."

Perennius nodded. He was glad that Sestius appreciated that the situation might have changed since he got his orders. Battles had been lost by the determination of hard-bitten subordinates to carry out instructions despite the manifest absurdity of those instructions. "Right, use what you've got on deck," the agent said. "Looks like we need the rowers most at the moment, though blazes! I'd like those other sixty Marines."

The agent paused. He was glad to be back in the midst of bloody disaster, out of the metaphysical swamp into which Calvus kept leading him. "Gaius," he said, "let's look - " his wound chewed up all the nerves on the right side of his body as he stepped toward the fighting tower.

"Blazes! Well, I'll take your word for it, and it's maybe a good thing anyhow." Perennius recollected how the damage had probably occurred. "Anyhow, it kept a spear out of my back. Another spear. Take the ballista apart, look like you're working on it, and make sure those bastards see what's going on."

He waved toward the Germans. They were still more than a bowshot away and well up on the liburnian's forequarter. The German commander seemed to have enough influence with his men to keep them balanced across the deck of his ship for now. With luck, that discipline would break down as the pirates made their run in.

Gaius looked startled at his protector's orders. "But s-sir," he said, "we can bluff them with the ballista even if we can't fix it. If I dismantle the thing, they'll know they don't have to be afraid of fire." He peered at Perennius as if he were expecting to see evidence of a head wound in addition to the bandage on the agent's upper thigh.

"We're going to try something different," Perennius said. He did not care if Gaius knew they were planning to ram, but he was worried about the effect on the others. If the Marines suddenly ran sternward for fear that the deck would lift beneath them, it might give the plan away to the pirates. And it was, despite the danger, the only plan that Perennius could imagine having even a chance of success. "We want this crew to come in just the way the first ones did."

The eyes of the younger Illyrian narrowed, but he gave a curt nod of assent. He cursed as the latter gave him a reminder of his shoulder wound, but he got to work promptly and obviously with his wrenches.

Sestius was bullying and cajoling injured sailors to pick up weapons in their good hands. Some of the men were hunched over cracked ribs or were weaving from concussion. Most of them would be able to stand with a spear leaned against them and at least give the appearance of defense. The survivors of the original Marine contingent looked glumly from their reinforcements to the hundred or more Germans. The pirates shouted as they eased in with a brail or two furled in the canvas. Several

of the Marines seemed to be in no better condition than the broken seamen who were joining them.

"Perennius, this is yours," Sabellia said quietly.

Her voice broke into what was less a reverie than a waking nightmare, as the agent surveyed his troops. He looked at the woman, then took from her the silken sling. It ran through his fingers undamaged, slick and deadly and quite useless to him now that it would tear him open to use it. Just a tool, unnecessary now and easily to be replaced . . . but Perennius smiled and took the sling and dropped it back into his pouch with the remainder of the bullets. "Glad you found it," he said truthfully.

Sabellia's short hair was damp. She had taken the time to wash the gore from it and her face before approaching the agent. Julia had had black hair, but both of the women were short and had the same non-Gallic - non-Aryan - features. "What should the rest of us do now?" she asked, and the voice was an echo both of the far past and of the alley in Rome where -

Perennius felt his skin grow hot with a surmise for which he had neither evidence nor time. He deliberately lifted his right leg, pivoting it at the hip so that the icy pain would sear away all thought of other times. "We stand to arms, looking like we're preparing to be boarded," he heard his voice say as the world narrowed down to the present again. He lowered his leg carefully. "Might help if we looked like we were scared to death." He glanced past Sabellia to the pirates. "That shouldn't be too difficult."

As Perennius spoke, the German seamen committed their craft. The pirates had been bellying over the waves some thousand feet from the liburnian - ahead and starboard on a parallel course. Their helmsman was a grizzled man whose hair and beard flared with milkweed fluff from beneath his peaked iron helmet. He threw the crossbar of his steering oar hard forward. The bow of his ship swung to port. The beitass was already clamped in place. As the port leech of the sail came up-wind, its two divisions damped each other fluttering at the rigid pole.

The helmsman gave a raw-voiced command. Loin-clouted Herulians snubbed or slacked the lines at which they were stationed, whichever the need might be. The square, leather-tightened sail swung on the mast to catch the wind at increasingly closer angles. As it did so, the sail's leverage rotated the vessel through the medium of the sailors straining at their lines. Gothic landsmen ducked or cursed as sheets snapped toward them.

Gaius jumped down from the tower, a perfect, boot-first arc controlled by his left palm on the wooden parapet. The tip of his scabbard rang on the deck as his knees flexed to absorb the shock. "A fine time to see how they'd swallow a ballista dart," the youth said with a toss of his head toward the pirates. He drew his long-bladed spatha. The nicks in its edge were obvious now that the steel had been rinsed of its coating of blood.

Perennius was returning to the state of mindless calm with which he generally entered battle. He was vaguely aware that Calvus stood beside him. The traveller was as still and erect as the pike in his hands. "Yes," the agent said. He imagined the chaos among the Germans if their seamen dropped their straining lines when a missile screamed down at them. Then he said, "Here they come."

The pirate craft had seemed to hover as it came about. Its starboard side, to leeward, had dipped and rolled a great swell in the direction of previous motion. Neither the keel nor the shallow draft of the German vessel were adequate to keep her from making leeway, sliding broadside over the sea. Because the Eagle was still plowing forward on the same course, however, the imperfection of the lighter vessel's sailing was disguised.

The pirates hung like a missile at the top of its arc. Then their ship began to slide toward the liburnian at a falling missile's deadly, increasing pace as well. Behind the agent, Leonidas was calling directions to his coxswain and steersmen alternately. Beside Perennius, Sestius repeated in stumbling Syriac the orders he had just given his men in Greek and Latin. "Keep your shields low. Duck beneath them but don't raise the shields or the bastards'll hock you sure from below."

Still slipping to starboard, but with enough way on to curl water around its bow, the pirate vessel bore down through bowshot to javelin-throw. The liburnian was moving at a fast walk. Cutting into the wind as she was, the

German craft could add no more than a knot to the closing speed. That the rush together of prey and slayer seemed so awesomely fast was an effect of the players' size. No beast carries forty tons above the surface, and the sail swelling over the pirates' deck at a sharp angle to starboard added bulk beyond its mass. A German archer, ordered sternward by men whose honor lay in their spears, managed to put an arrow through the forward leech of his own sail.

Perennius knew the men with him on deck were tensely listening for the sound of thole-pins being pulled and the oars themselves being shipped rattlingly as they had been during the first attack. Instead, the pattern of stroking remained the same, only one per four seconds, because the oarsmen were exhausted. The volume diminished, however, as for a stroke and another stroke the starboard oarsmen marked time with their blades lifted high and dripping back into the sea.

There was a hoarse cry from among the pirates. Even the Goths understood what was about to happen sooner than did the men on the liburnian's deck. The view of the men on the Eagle was blocked by the fighting tower and the overhang of the deck. The liburnian's bluff bow swung starboard half a point. The German craft a hundred, fifty, twenty feet away would have crunched along the starboard hull as her predecessor had done. Now the curling bowsprit and the jib for the unset boat-sail bisected the view of onrushing attackers.

As Perennius had anticipated, the pirates had shifted forward when the ships closed. Their weight lifted the stern and dissolved the last chance that the Herulian steersman would be able to prevent the Roman plan from succeeding. All the liburnian's oars stroked together once more. The pirates' sail was slatting down according to prearranged plan. It was unable to change their attitude at the last instant, and the steering oar only clipped the wavetops with the load of warriors forward.

The Eagle rode the Germans down with the merciless assurance of a landslide.

The liburnian had been designed to hole her opponents below the waterline when she rammed. Her projecting bronze beak had been removed when she was laid up, however, and it had not seemed either practical or necessary to the agent to have it refitted before they set out. As a result, it was the liburnian's up-curved stem-piece which made the first contact with the pirate craft. It rode over the Germans' gunwale just starboard of their cutwater.

The crash threw down everyone in both ships.

One of Sestius's Marines rolled over the edge, but his screams were lost in other sounds. For long seconds, mechanical noise was the only thing which the world permitted to exist. Though the pirate ship was smaller and lighter, it was built Northern fashion of rough-sawn oak. Its hull could not withstand the mass of the liburnian, but it resisted to the point of mutual destruction as the aged pine planking ground through it.

The Eagle's mast snapped at the deck. The mast could be stepped or unstepped depending on whether the ship was being readied for cruising or war. The certainty that the larger vessel would be crippled if it rammed with its sail set had probably convinced the Herulian captain that nothing of the sort could be intended. Like Leonidas, he was too much a seaman to imagine another captain so wantonly destroying his own vessel. Perennius, living through the result the Tarantine had forseen, wondered whether the traveller's persuasion had been only verbal.

The mast partners, the great timbers that spread the thrust of the sail across six deck beams, held - forcing the mast itself to shear just above them. Tons of mast, spar, and canvas lurched forward, driven by its inertia and the breeze still trying to fill the collapsing sail. The mast itself struck the parapet of the fighting tower and continued driving forward. The rear wall of the tower smashed in and all the cleats pulled out of the deck. Even so, the tower saved the contingent standing forward to repel boarders. The top-hamper would otherwise have spread general death and maiming among them.

What was happening aboard the pirate craft defied belief.

The German warriors had been screaming insults and descriptions of their battle prowess as the two ships drew closer. When the pirates realized what was about to

happen, even the front rank of slaughter-maddened berserkers was shocked into a different - if no more sane - state of mind. Men who had steeled themselves to face swords and missiles realized that eighty tons of timber would make no more of their courage than it made of the water creaming to either side of the prow. Their surge forward, shields raised, spears clanging, suddenly reversed into a panicked flight toward the stern with all weapons dropped or forgotten.

The attempt to escape was both useless and too late. The gunwale splintered. The pirates' bow dipped under with a rush. Panicked warriors were ground between pine keel and oak decking like olives in a press. The wood shrieked louder than the men.

The sea did not enter the pirate craft through a hole but rather over the whole forward half of the ship. The stern heaved up, throwing the furious steersman to meet the oncoming Eagle with the broken tiller in his hands. The sea churned up foam and blood and splinters as the liburnian plowed on.

The low-decked pirate vessel squeezed sideways with its port hull in the air. Its own mast did not break as the liburnian's had: it ripped apart the keel into which it was butted. As the ship went fully under water, it belched a huge gulp of air which had been trapped by the suddenness of the disaster between the hull timbers and the decking immediately over them. Then the pirate ship was gone. With it went almost every one of the men who had been screaming for blood less than a minute before.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Eagle herself was proceeding only on inertia. The shock had thrown her oarsmen off their stroke and generally off their benches, though there was nothing like the number of serious injuries below that the first attack had caused. The previous impact had been transmitted through the oars and the men who had cushioned it with their bodies. This time, the liburnian's hull had no such cushion. What that meant was not long to be explored.

Perennius lay under a flapping edge of the sail. He tried to stand up but was surprised by the weight of the spray-dampened linen. Calvus gripped a double handful of the canvas and lifted it for the agent and Sabellia. "It's just my damned leg," Perennius muttered in self-apology.

"Come on, come on," Sestius was demanding, "Get up, you don't want to roll overboard now, do you?" He rapped at the heels of Marines who still lay on the decks, using the vine-wood baton that served him both as rank insignia and a practical tool.

"Glad I wasn't on that," Gaius muttered as he surveyed the remains of the fighting tower. The thigh-thick mast lay across it.

The cry from below decks was wordless and riveting. It was a moment later before the screams, swelling stern-ward from the front of the rowing chamber, finally contained a message intelligible to those standing frozen above: "Water! We're sinking!"

The Eagle had drifted to a halt several hundred feet from where she ground the pirates under. There was some flotsam off the stern to starboard, but none of it appeared to be living. There was nothing else on the sea for scale or reference except the liburnian's own shadow dimming the brighter highlights of the waves.

One of the Marines trembled, then jumped straight over the side. He must have sunk like a stone in his armor. Perennius had other things now to worry about.

The rush on deck this time led by the cook. His assistant and the slaves must have been set to oars for the final pull, because none of them were intermixed with the next score of seamen climbing through the hatchway. The grate had been displaced from the forward ventilator when the first pirate ship struck. Now the vent provided a long, wide passage for rowers who jumped up on their benches and clambered through. Astern, the after hatch was spewing up the rest of the oarsmen despite anything the officers could do. The coxswain's drum could be heard banging furiously over the shouts.

Gaius clutched the agent's wrist in a grip that made the older man wince. "Aulus!" the young courier cried, "what are they doing? We're all right! We're not sinking!"

Got a hundred seamen who'd argue with you, Perennius thought. He was not quite bitter enough at his friend's incipient hysteria to say that out loud, however. Everyone had his own terror. Gaius had hidden his own so well in the past that when it broke out, it was the most irritating, a trusted prybar that suddenly snapped.

Perennius' eyes wandered toward the heap of canvas. It covered the ballista and perhaps the shards and coals of the amphora which had held the fire. Unbanked, scattered, the coals must have gone out by now. Must have. "Whatever it is," the agent said in a voice that reserved judgment, "we'll deal with it." He used his free hand to release the other from his protege's grip. There was nothing clearly useful to be doing. Even the sailors, once they had swarmed from the rowing chamber, only milled around on deck babbling prayers. "Blazes," Perennius muttered, and he climbed down the ladder that had just passed the rowers upward.

When the agent had jumped down to get the fire and oil, the belly of the ship had been full of men and sound.

Now the only men were two officers, the coxswain and Leonidas himself. They were stumbling forward, over the litter of broken benches and the oar handles which swung slowly as the waves levered at their blades. That flaccid creaking was not the only sound below, however. There was also the gurgling rush of water.

The Eagle was decked at about her normal full-load waterline, a little more than two feet above the keel and bottom-planking. There was no proper hold. The liburnian's only cargo was her rowing complement on its two-tiered benches. The bilges had filled within hours of the ship's return to the water, because her seams had opened during the years she was laid up. After the hull planking had swelled, that dangerous flow had subsided to a seepage that kept waste in the bilges wet enough to slosh and stink but which no longer threatened the life of the ship.

The oar deck stood in water forward. The flow was not only in sheets through started seams, but also in an angry geyser around the cook's stores. Part of the bow must have been staved in. The Germans whose flesh had greased the outer hull would shortly have their revenge.

"Pollux, captain!" moaned the coxswain, "we are sinking. Pollux, how could you ram us into them when you knew the hull was rotten as punk? Oh, Castor and Pollux, favor a seaman who - "

"Shut up!" snarled Leonidas. The Tarantine still wore his sword. Its sheath had worked around to his back like a shagreen tail. "We'll rig the sail over the bows to slow the leaking, then we'll pull for shore. Land can't be more than just over the horizon."

Water gurgled and curled at his insteps. It was well up on Perennius' shins. The agent could see that the bottom rung of the companion ladder was about to go under.

The coxswain broke. His sandals splashed, then squelched, as he ran toward the aft hatch along the upper tier of benches.

"Well, what else can we do, then?" Leonidas screamed at his retreating back. The captain turned, cursing in polyglot. Then he sprang past Perennius and up the ladder. The agent could see the tears in Leonidas' eyes.

Perennius climbed the ladder after the captain, but only in a physical sense was he following Leonidas now. The agent recalled how blithely he had bounded up and down through the hatchway less than an hour before. Well, the almighty Sun knew the same two inches of iron could have stiffened more of him than one thigh.

Leonidas was giving loud orders and gesturing at the sail with his sword. He seemed to have drawn the weapon to cut entangling cordage, but the gestures became increasingly brusque as men ignored him. A deck crewman, then two others, moved to help. The bulk of the crowd now on deck was rowers. On duty, they had had too little contact with Leonidas to respond to him as an officer when they were shaken with panic.

Both Gaius and Calvus waited at the hatch for the agent. They bent together, each supporting Perennius beneath one elbow and lifting him back on deck smoothly. If you can't have two good legs, the agent thought wryly, be a cripple with friends. Blazes.

He put a hand on the waist of either man and shooed them ten feet down the deck where there was less congestion of men working or babbling in fear. "Sestius!" he called, knowing that when the centurion joined, Sabellia would come also. The agent did not want to use the Gallic woman's name, did not want to think about her - did not want her to become separated.

Sestius strode to them promptly. He had been lending a clumsy hand to Leonidas and his sailors. The centurion's face was flushed even darker than usual. "Sir," he said, "we're going to wrap the sail over the bow like a bandage. That'll stop the water coming in until we can make proper repairs on - "

"At ease!" Perennius said sharply. Blazes, they were all coming loose. Maybe he was himself and he just didn't realize it. Sabellia watched from beyond the centurion's shoulder. Her hand was tight on her knife hilt, another response to tension when its cause was unapproachable. "We're going to leave the ship, now," the agent said to the faces bending close to his. "We're going to use this grating - " he touched a boot to the wooden grate displaced from the forward ventilator - "as a float, and

we're going to kick it and paddle it along all night if we have to until we reach land."

Both Gaius and Sestius started to speak. "Aulus, we can't - " blurted out with, "Sir, the sail will - "

Both reactions were expected. "At ease!" Perennius snarled. He glared at the two military men. By god, he might not be able to lead men or organize them, but he could damned well make a small group listen while he spoke! "We can do it, and we are going to do it," he said fiercely to the panic which did not quite rule Gaius' face. "Because the whole hull is cracking, and that sail isn't going to do a damned thing for the big hole in the bow anyway. Now, get your armor off and your boots. Move!"

The order gave both men what they needed, a raft of hope on which their minds could float. Only Perennius himself had to worry about their real chances of paddling a fucking grate the gods knew -

"Land seems to be about seven miles off, Aulus Perennius," the bald man said. "The currents are a question, of course, but I was raised for strength - " he smiled - "as you know."

"Blazes, we're going to get through this," the agent said. Gaius and the centurion were fumbling at buckles. Their fingers were swollen by the shock of recent battle. "I said we would, didn't I?" Gods, Calvus had learned to smile like a human; and he, Aulus Perennius, was making jokes about his own sense of duty. "What is the land?" he asked aloud. "Cyprus or the mainland? I haven't much cared in the past so long as the seamen were satisfied; and I don't think this is the time to ask."

Two of Leonidas' men had dropped over the side. They were clinging to the hawsers they would try to run beneath the keel. The stern of the Eagle swung in the breeze. It rose noticeably higher from the sea than did the bow, so that it caught more of the wind now that they were not under sail.

"I don't know either," the traveller said. He gestured westward again. "The - heat of the air currents rising shows that there is land, but I don't know which land. I have many abilities, Aulus Perennius, but not many skills. Strength doesn't make me a trained warrior, and seeing farther into the - seeing light when others cannot, let me put it that way - doesn't teach me geography."

"Help me," called Sabellia.

Sestius and the agent reacted with equal cold-eyed promptitude. "Mine, by the Lord," muttered a seaman in Syriac. Perennius rabbit-punched him, spilling the man down on his side before he could snatch at the amphora Sabellia was trying to raise through the ventilator.

The crew was expected to buy their food each evening when the ship was beached. There was a quantity of emergency stores, however, grain and wine, for times when they made land after dark or a storm prevented proper foraging. Those stores were still stowed below between the benches. The fact had been forgotten by men to whom the rowing chamber had become a place of fear and rising water. While the men of her own party were preoccupied, Sabellia had slid down through the vent and had manhandled free an amphora of wine. Sheer determination did not, however, give her the strength to lift the awkward five-gallon container over her head unaided.

"Take the jar," Perennius said to the centurion. There was already a movement of men toward the container. Some crewmen started to slip below to get their own. Leonidas cried out in fury. The agent ignored him. He bent at the waist, offering his left hand to Sabellia when Sestius had snatched the amphora up by its ears. With her weight on his good leg, Perennius lifted her. He shouted, "More wine below! Enough for all of us!" Under his breath, he added to the man and woman, "Now, let's get the hell out of here."

The sea was growing darker now. The sky was still clear and seemingly bright, but the individuals of the Eagle's crew were losing definition even as the liburnian's bow slipped lower. "Wait," said Sabellia, knotting her sash around the neck of the amphora. The others stood in a watchful circle around their prize. They exuded a tense willingness to fight the increasingly raucous crowd of seamen if necessary. "We'll be all right without food," the woman said as she jerked the knot tight, "but the sun'll be our death if we're still out in the morning with nothing to drink."

"The Sun is life," Perennius said sharply as Sabellia's words tripped a childhood recollection of blasphemy. But he was beyond that now in his conscious mind; beyond trust in anything but himself and perhaps - "Let's get in the water," the agent said. He bent and lifted one end of the twenty-foot grating.

Perennius slid into the sea after the makeshift float. He made as little noise as possible. Sestius followed with a huge splash, as attention-getting as it was unnecessary. The port outrigger from which they were abandoning ship was only three feet above the water now. Sabellia knelt, tossed the free end of her sash to her lover, and lowered the amphora with the minimal commotion of a duck diving. The jar was heavier than water, but the sea buoyed it up enough that the wool sash was an adequate shackle. The woman's tunic billowed up away from her body as she slipped in feet-first.

The sea was ice encasing Perennius's battle-heated body. The salt was fire on his wound. The lips of the wound puckered. The agent gasped. It felt for a moment as if lava were being sucked into his marrow.

"Gaius, Calvus!" Perennius hissed "Get in!" He could not have shouted even if the situation permitted it, but the harsh fragment of voice which pain left him suited well the whispered imperatives needed at the moment.

Gaius stared at the float with the expression of a man startled by Medusa. Both his hands were locked on the hilt of the sword sheathed at his right side. The skin over his knuckles was as mottled as that of his face. The grating had begun to drift away from the liburnian, pushed lightly by the pressure of the three who had caught hold of it.

Without speaking or even appearing to see his comrades in the water, the young Illyrian turned back toward the tumult on deck. Perennius started to call Gaius' name again in furious despair. He was certain that he would have to climb aboard again and try to throw the courier bodily into the water - that or abandon him. Perennius was damned if he was going to abandon - but he need not have worried. He had forgotten Calvus.

The tall man stood in his attitude of concentration. The splash Sestius had made had drawn some attention but no anger, not yet. There was still wine to be looted. The sun bled through clouds on the horizon. The sight of people drifting off toward it still looked like an act of despair, not hope. Later, and not very much later from the speed with which the Eagle's bow settled, Perennius expected a blast of rage directed at everything surrounding those who saw themselves condemned. The agent and his companions had to be well beyond missile range of the liburnian by the time that happened.

Gaius turned back and stepped off the side of the ship. He had the blank-eyed aplomb of a man who had forgotten there was a drop-off. He spluttered in the water. Perennius seized him by the neck of his tunic and dragged him to the float with an expression of relief and joy. Calvus, quiet but now mobile again, sat awkwardly on the catwalk and pushed himself into the sea. Even though his feet were already in the water, the tall man managed to make a considerable splash. The agent continued to grin as he reached out to grab Calvus' hand. The traveller was as clumsy as a hog on ice, but by the gods! he was good to have around in a tight place.

Blazes, they all were - all his companions. If the empire were kept by no one worse ... it would be kept, as it seemed probable it would not in reality.

"I think," said the agent, shaken by reaction and the rage which was the only way he knew to combat despair, "that if we all kick together - quietly! - we can get a few hundred feet away without attracting much attention. We'll worry then about navigating. For now, the important thing is not to catch javelins between our shoulder blades."

Suiting action to his words, the Illyrian scissored out a kick that did not break the surface of the water. It was excruciatingly painful to his right thigh. That was, in its way, a blessing. It took his mind away from the useless-ness of his action and the mission beyond it to the only goal which had mattered to Aulus Perennius for twenty years: the stability of his world.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It became much worse after dark. While there was still a trace of light, it served as a goal toward which to kick. When even that trace had shrunk and vanished, the grating was alone with the sea and the moonless sky. Perennius trusted Calvus' sense of direction, though he did not understand the mechanism. The others seemed to trust Perennius, though the gods alone knew why. He should never have set sail without a full complement of Marines! When he got back, he'd find the bureaucrat responsible and -

It was hard to imagine getting back to Rome, when you were thrusting at the water which surrounded you without even a horizon to be seen.

Sabellia yelped. She began splashing at the water with an arm as well as her legs. Sestius, across from her at the "bow" end, shouted, "What is it? What is it?" as the float bobbed and yawed.

The commotion subsided as abruptly as it had begun. "It's all right," the woman gasped. She was clinging to the grate with both hands again. They had all stopped their desultory kicking for the moment. It was a good time for another break. "Something b-bit my toe. It was just a nibble, but . . ." Sabellia did not have to finish the sentence for the others to scan the surface around them. It was so dark that no fin could have been glimpsed against the waves anyway.

There had to be more small fish than sharks, of course. In Italy, still protected from the shambling terror of the Germans, rich men raised mullets as pets as much as for food. The owners could sit on the lips of their ponds and call, while the water boiled with scaly bodies rushing to be the first to caress their master's fingers. That memory was now like a scene from Hell.

"Do you want a sword?" Perennius called forward to the woman. Gaius had kept his blade, lashing it to the grating between him and the agent. If it would offer Sabellia some security, that was better than having the salt etch it uselessly where it was now.

"No, it just startled me," the woman said. "I have my knife, if I needed . . ." She reached over with one hand and stroked the clothes in a soggy packet between her and the centurion. All the castaways but Calvus, alone in the stern where his efforts equalled the combined efforts of the rest of them, had stripped off their clothing only minutes after they set out on the float. The cloth had dragged at their limbs, weighting and robbing of force all their attempts to distance themselves from the liburnian. Tied atop the grating, the garments did not interfere with movement, but they were still available against the morrow's sun. Sunburn could disable as thoroughly as blazing oil when its victims were spread-eagled on the sea for its attentions.

A rumbling sound clutched at their bodies in the water seconds before their ears heard it through the air.

"Aulus!" the courier cried. He heaved himself up on the float as if the shock waves were in fact tentacles squeezing and releasing and ready to squeeze again.

"It's just a whale calling," the agent said sharply. He had been momentarily frozen himself by the immersion in distant sound.

"No," said Calvus, his voice drifting with the breeze, "it was the ship. It just went down."

The cries could as well as not be those of gulls, wheeling against the stars in search of the white water that indicated fish shoaling. Indeed, the cries could be those of gulls even if the flesh that sparkled their thin commotion was not that of fish at all. The sound still told of men dying.

Perennius had seen it happen off Alexandria harbor, a

grain ship foundering within minutes of the help that would have saved at least the crew. The stern rose sharply, its great rudder flapping desperately for help. Then, swifter than a ship on the ways being launched, the vessel had plunged vertically. In its rush for the bottom, the ship sucked in and swept along the screaming crewmen who had flung themselves over the side at the last instant. Compartments crashed inward under the increasing pressure, belching up cargo and timbers and men, some of them still alive. The customs boat Perennius was aboard had saved three men and the ship's cat. It was more than anyone among the rescuers had thought probable.

The Eagle had died without even that hope. Might the merciful Sun take them to his bosom.

"Back to work," Perennius said aloud. "We've got a ways yet to go."

It was hours later that they heard the other ship.

Perhaps Calvus could have said just how many hours it had been. For the rest of them, the time since sunset had been a blur of fatigue punctuated with moments of terror or despair. They had been exhausted, physically and emotionally, when they entered the water. The sea's chill and the difference it provided from what they had been doing before at least colored the first brief span of time on the float.

The remainder of the experience was a white blotch as fatigue poisons leached away the attempts of minds to think along with the ability of muscles to move. When the castaways rested, they lay their heads on the pine grate and were drenched, eyes and noses and the mouths through which they tried to breathe, by seas. The salt water pulsed through the interstices of the grating. When they labored, they stretched at full length in that sea with only their hands on the wood to buoy them and remind them of the purpose for which they punished themselves.

It was during a pause that they realized, more or less together, that the squealing sound was not the breath in their lungs or an artifact of fatigue in their ears. Someone was stroking a ship closer. There was even an undercurrent of voices chanting as they kept the long sweeps creaking forward in unison.

"Herakles!" said Sestius in the tone of a man who watched an apotheosis. He tried to lift his torso onto the grating, but his arms would not support his weight. "Somebody's found us."

"It's a boat?" Gaius wheezed from behind the centurion.

"Wait, dammit, keep your voices down," Perennius insisted. For the first moment, he was speaking only from instincts of secretiveness burned into him during circumstances in which every human was an enemy. When his mind cleared enough for thought, however, his reaction was the same. He tilted his head, and tried to drain water out of his left ear canal by stretching it with a fingertip. That did not help clarity enough. "Calvus," he called over the waves' mild slapping, "can you tell who it is?"

"They're speaking German, Aulus Perennius," the traveller replied. "I think it may be - "

"Help us!" cried Gaius over the sound of oarlocks. "Help us for god's sake!"

The agent's first motion was toward his side and the sword he was not wearing there. "Gaius!" he snarled across the bundled clothes. "Shut up or - "

"Aulus, we're going to drown!" the younger man screamed. Everyone has his own fear. . . . "Help us! Help us!"

Perennius' mind had already planned the killing. He would go under the float, not over it. He would seize Gaius by the knees, jerk his head under water, and shift his grip to the younger man's throat to strangle him. But as the agent's hands poised to drive him under the narrow grating, his intellect reasserted itself over the murderous reflexes which had been his life for so many years. He relaxed. The tempo of the sweeps had already slowed. Moments later the squealing stopped entirely. It was replaced by a louder rumble of voices which Perennius himself could now tell were speaking German.

Blazes.

"All right," the agent said, loudly but in Latin. "Calvus is an envoy to Odenath, Bella's his wife, the rest of us are high staff officers accompanying him. We're worth money! And blazes! let me do the talking - understand?" As he

spoke, Perennius was grubbing through folds of wet garments to reach the pouch containing the bullets he had not fired during the battle. He had forgotten to take the pouch off when he jumped into the sea, a lapse he would have called self-destructive madness if someone else had done the same thing. Now the agent opened the flap and spilled the leaden missiles out into the sea.

He hoped the sling itself would pass in the darkness and confusion. At any rate, he was not ready to abandon it just yet. But high, ransom-worthy Roman officers were not likely to be found carrying pouches of sling bullets.

The sweeps were creaking again, noticeably closer. Soon the castaways would be able to see their rescuers cresting a swell.

If they were the people Perennius suspected they were, they would have a very clear memory of bullets from his sling.

The ship, a darkness of sharp lines against the blur of the elements, loomed over the grating to starboard. It was almost close enough for Perennius to reach out and touch the nearest oar.

"Christ protect us!" said Sabellia in a voice that held little hope of that protection. "They're the ones we set afire and got away from."

And who else would have come upon us in these waters, thought the agent. He cried in German, "Wotan has blessed you, glorious warriors! Your arms will drip with gold from our ransom!"

It might have worked. Perennius was still not surprised that the pirates clubbed him unconscious as they dragged him over the gunwale of their ship.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"You hit this one too hard," a voice was saying. The words buzzed and threw purple after-images across the surface of Perennius' mind.

"No, he's not dead," another voice replied. They were both speaking in German, but the dialect differed from that which Perennius had learned in his youth. The vowels were shorter and flatter than those of the South Rhineland. "Besides, what does it matter? We should have thrown them all back into the sea. Except for the women."

There were sounds besides the men speaking nearby. There was an indistinct murmur, more voices at greater distance . . . the crackle of a fire . . . occasional clapping and hoots of triumph.

There were also moans.

The agent's hands and arms were tied to a post behind his back. He opened his eyes a slit to watch through the hedge of lashes. The ship the Eagle had fought clear of that afternoon was now hauled up on a narrow beach. The cookfire close by laid gleams and shadows across the sun-bleached oak of the ship's planking. The hull was clinker built. Each row of planks overlapped the row beneath it instead of butting smoothly edge to edge as was the normal method here in the South. It gave the pirate vessel a ridged, implacable appearance like that of a crocodile digesting a child on a mud bank.

Across the fire from their ship, most of the pirates were gang-raping two women. The nearer of the victims was Sabellia.

"Well, go ahead and cut his throat, then, Grim," the first voice was saying. "Biarni! Isn't that meat cooked yet?"

Perennius opened his eyes and raised his head to the post from which he had been sagging. He gave what was meant to be a smile of greeting. The agent's legs sprawled out in front of him. He had to remember to kick with the left one, though the numbness in the right was less than he would have - "Warriors!" he said aloud in his Schwabian dialect. "Our ransom will make all of you ring-givers! And I will sacrifice to my own gods in thanks at being overcome by heroes so great!"

"He's awake, Anulf," said the owner of the second voice. He looked uncertainly toward the other Goth who stood beside the bound agent.

Perennius was tied to one of the posts of what had been a fenced garden. The pirates had slashed gaps in the wattle fencing to use the posts for immobilizing their prisoners. Gaius was struggling with his bonds eight feet to the agent's left, and the huddled figure at the post beyond the courier was presumably Sestius. The farmhouse itself still burned sluggishly in the background. It must have been quite a display when its thatch blazed up. A moment's thought would have given the pirates the building for shelter; but they obviously spent few enough moments on thought.

Vicious little children, and nothing but a tottering Empire to keep the world from becoming their world.

Grim, the Goth who had drawn a single-edged knife to finish the agent, had no left arm below the elbow. He wore a green tunic with embroidered sleeves. The tunic was of good quality, but that was no indicator of rank among pirates who had had the opportunity to pick their choice of looted clothing. The obvious leader of the band was the man the other had called Anulf, a great, brown-bearded hulk of a fellow with a livid bruise on his forehead.

Perennius thought he recognized Anulf from the instant before their ships collided. The Gothic chieftain had been in the front rank then, wearing a gilded helmet crested

with the image of a long-tusked boar. The pirate had gone down with a crash as an oar blade ended his fight before it began. He was not wearing the helmet now, nor the leather cuirass faced with large bronze disks which the agent remembered also from the battle. Anulf did carry his long sword, however, slung across his back from a baldric. The birds-head pommel waved over his shoulder like one of the Wotan's ravens.

Now Anulf looked at Perennius with the interest a shopper gives a carcass in the poulterer's shop: checking the hind feet to be sure of buying rabbit and not cat. "You're the leader of this lot?" the German asked. "The woman said you are."

"The woman?" Perennius repeated. Sabellia had broken? Of all of them, the agent would have guessed she would hold out the longest. . . .

But as Perennius turned his head to the right, a swarthy Herulian rose to his feet crying, "Five!" The German still wore a tunic of iron-buckled deerskin. It flapped back down over his thighs as he stood up. Two friends pounded his back in triumph. One of them was jiggling ale or looted wine from the jeweled cup he offered.

Sabellia's wrists were tied to another post. Early on, two of the cheering pirates had probably held the woman's ankles outstretched also. That was no longer necessary. Sabellia's face lolled toward the agent. The eyes were open with fully-dilated pupils, but there was no mind behind them. Her mouth was drooling. The pirates had carried out their business with no more than the requisite brutality. The bloody lip might very well have been self-inflicted. The scratches on Sabellia's breasts and flat rib-cage were the results of individual warriors' teeth and harness, not deliberate whipping. Even the bruises already starting to appear were most likely the result of enthusiasm and the rocky soil.

Only once before had Perennius seen eyes that looked as Sabellia's did now. He had been with the detachment which crucified a slave who had murdered his master. At the last, the victim no longer had the strength to stand on the spike which had been driven through the instep of his feet, pinning them to the base of the cross. The man's knees sagged, drawing his wrists down against the nails that held them to the crossbar. In that position, the diaphragm could not inflate the lungs against the full weight of the torso pressing down on it. The eyes of that slave, beyond pain and fear of the suffocation which would kill him in a few minutes, were as empty as Sabellia's.

A huge, blond Goth wearing a mail shirt but no trousers lowered himself onto Sabellia. He was accompanied by the encouragement of several of his fellows. The attempt to equal the Herulian's feat looked doomed to limp failure, especially since the victim's labiae were swollen from the bruising.

"Yeah, the funny bald one," Anulf was saying. "I took her first myself. None of the others would have dared, but Anulf fears nothing!"

"Dare?" shouted the Herulian with the chalice. It spilled as he turned. He pointed at the Gothic chieftain's face. "What do you know about daring when you lie on your back all the fight?"

The wrists of the figure beyond Sabellia were tied to a post just as the Gallic woman's were. Perennius stared beyond the frustrated mumbling of the would-be rapist and the mewling woman beneath him. There was no one astride the second victim at the moment. She squirmed into a sitting position against the post. The motion implied either double-jointed shoulders or more slack than was to be expected in the straps that held her. She looked back at the agent. Her face was at first void. Then it quirked with the tiny smile that had become an expression increasingly common with her.

Perennius knew why "Lucius Cloelius Calvus" had always worn at least a tunic while in company. Of course the agent had never thought that "Calvus" was a real name.

The fire crackling beneath the pig halved lengthwise gave Anulf's beard a redder cast as he turned to the interruption. The Herulian had paused to take a slurping drink from his cup. No one else seemed to be paying much attention.

Calvus' chest was as flat as a man's, flatter than the agent's because Perennius' chest muscles bulged even at

rest. Calvus' pectorals lay in sheets that belied their demonstrated strength. Her nipples were small and pale, even though the firelight emphasized contrasts. Her body for as far as Perennius could see was as hairless as her head. Presumably Calvus' genitals had determined her sex even to Germans who were taken aback by her appearance.

The story that Perennius had sketched out, that Calvus was an envoy and the rest of them were on "his" staff, had become absurd at the moment the pirates tore off the traveller's tunic. Well, the agent would come up with another story.

Even now, the most feminine thing about Calvus was the lack of a prominent Adam's apple in her slim throat. Perennius found it hard to believe that he had overlooked that feature for so long, but - a bald woman six feet four inches tall?

Anulf wore wooden-soled boots. They were cross-strapped up his calves. He flicked his head to the left, drawing the Herulian's eyes toward the cooking fire. Then Anulf kicked out fiercely, planting the sole of his right boot in the Herulian's groin.

The Goth's victim doubled up, spewing wine from his mouth and nostrils. Anulf was not finished. He snatched the knife from his one-armed companion. The Herulian had sunk to his knees wheezing and vomiting. Anulf stabbed him behind the shoulder blade, a pounding blow which he followed with a second. At the third stab, the Herulian who had just finished with Sabellia tried to grab the Goth's wrist. Anulf threw him back, but the hilt of the knife remained protruding from the wound this time.

The murder had made surprisingly little noise, but now every German Perennius could see was standing. Men were appearing from the darkness. There were not as many of them as the agent had feared; only a score or so out of an original complement of over a hundred. Some of the able-bodied pirates must have boarded the second ship and gone to the bottom with it. None of the men Perennius saw had serious wounds. The pirates' own casualties must have gone over the side with no more ceremony than so much spoiled fruit.

Anulf glared around his assembled band. "When I need advice on courage from a Herulian donkey-fucker," he roared, "I'll ask for it!"

The body of Anulf's victim was shuddering. The knife hilt danced in the firelight. The Herulian who had tried to intervene in the killing had stepped back. His own short sword was half drawn. The blond Goth who had taken his place on Sabellia now grabbed the Herulian's elbows from behind. Another Goth cuffed the Herulian hard enough that his knees sagged.

The Herulians had been a small minority of the band, just enough to provide the Goths with seamen to work their ships. The fighting, due in part to the agent's sling and marksmanship, had accounted for most of those. It was quite obvious to Perennius from the appearance and attitude of the pirates he saw that there were only three Herulians left in the band: two of them standing, surrounded by Goths, and the third on the ground twitching out his last few seconds of life.

With deliberation, a Goth wearing brass bracelets coiled the length of both forearms stepped forward. He planted a spear in the chest of the Herulian who had grappled with Anulf. The victim jerked backward. The Goth holding him from behind cursed as the point pricked him through the Herulian's body.

The last surviving Herulian had been edging away from the trouble. He was not wearing a weapon. When the spearhead thudded through his companion's jerkin, he turned to run. He tripped on Sabellia's outstretched legs and sprawled on the ground between the two women. Anulf himself stepped forward. He pinned the Herulian with the point of his long sword before the man could rise. The dying man's body arched like that of a fish on the gaff. He screamed, but the sound disintegrated into bubbling as Anulf leaned more weight onto his weapon. When the chieftain withdrew the sword with a sudden jerk, the Herulian was silent. Eight inches of the blade were stained with arterial blood as bright as the fire that illuminated it.

"Should've done this weeks ago," Anulf muttered. He wiped at the bloody sword with the edge of his tunic.

"Bastards wouldn't have run us right into those oars if I had."

Aulus Perennius had been in too many fights to concentrate on any one thing when his death might be in the hands of the man on the other side. But even while he watched men seizing weapons and tensing for murder, the agent kept one eye on Calvus. He recognized the traveller's fixed expression in the moments while Goths were deciding whether or not to let the incident pass. And Perennius recognized the expression that followed on Calvus' face, when Anulf's sword crunched free of the Herulian's ribs. That second expression perfectly reflected the joy Perennius himself felt at watching the German die between the rape victims.

"Biarni!" Anulf said as he turned from the body. He reached over his back with both hands to guide his sword into its sheath. His fingers were trembling. "Cut me some goddam meat! And where's the wine?"

The agent exchanged glances with Calvus. Between them, Sabellia had begun to snore heavily. The pirates were settling down to a meal of wine and pork. The meat was half-charred and half-raw from the look of the slabs. 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 moderate size, but it had double bitts and the look of hard use to it. The pirate sauntered over to Sabellia, raising his weapon casually.

Perennius tensed. He would have to use his left foot and kick over his injured right leg. If he could catch the Goth at the back of the knee, the man might fall backwards and - and get up to kill them all, but -

"All right, we'll see what kind of cook you make," the Goth said. As the agent relaxed, the axe chopped the thong against the post to which it was anchored. The pirate pumped his axehead loose while Sabellia rolled off her buttocks to her feet. Her smile had changed to something very different when the Goth who freed her looked away.

"Frigg's balls, you scut!" Anulf roared as he saw what was happening behind him. "Who told you to let the bitch loose, Theudas?"

The other Goth had been wiping wood fibers from the nicks in the edge before he put his axe up. Now, gripping his weapon just below the head, he wheeled and demanded, "Who died and made you god, Anulf? I guess you'd let us all starve, wouldn't you?"

"Yeah," snarled another of the men who had brought back the heifer. He strode toward the chief from the other side. "Just what have you done besides get most of us killed on this raid?"

Anulf's one-armed companion was reaching furtively for a spear at the moment tension broke. Biarni had gotten up when Anulf's attention turned from him. The cook, trying to creep away while he still watched his chief, had immediately fallen again into the coals of last night's fire. His squeals of pain and terror brought another surge of laughter from the remaining Germans. Their anger melted at the hilarious spectacle of a cripple dancing in a cloud of ashes.

"Here," Sabellia said. She stepped to Theudas with her wrists, still bound, upraised. The Goth sawed through the knot with his axe. Theudas was nearly seven feet tall. He bent over Sabellia, concentrating on his awkward task like a tailor threading a fine needle. The picture of his care was frighteningly at variance with the agent's memory of the night before, the huge blond figure kneeling to rape the woman for the fifth time.

Anulf's companion tried to hand him the spear. The chieftain looked around to see why he was being prodded. The anger that had been directed first at the cook, then at Theudas, now flared up at the one-armed man. Anulf slapped the spear away with a curse. Then he aimed a kick which Grim dodged with the ease born of experience.

Sabellia was draping herself with a cloak of lustrous brown wool appropriated from another of the pirates. It hung down to her knees. The throat, meant for the neck of a big man, hung from her shoulders. She had pinned it up with the hems overlapping. Perennius noted that the woman, despite her present kittenishness, had not brushed

at the grit and leaves clinging to her skin when she stood. "One of you take the loin out of that cow," she called.

A pirate immediately roared, "Biarni! Get out and get busy or I'll kick your useless butt back to the Bosphorus!"

With most of the Gothic pirates following her, Sabellia stepped into the kitchen garden. "All right, pick some of that," she began. "That's thyme and we'll need it. Now let's see, is there any mint?"

Perennius twisted around his fencepost to watch the woman and her entourage. He was certain that it was all a ruse. As soon as Sabellia got her hands on a knife, she would stab as many of the startled Goths as her fury could reach. The agent recognized the look he had seen in her eyes. Murder was a reasonable desire, but Sabellia would be cut down before she got more than one or two of her rapists. Worse, her action would eliminate any chance Perennius himself had of release.

Anulf was watching his men with a look as sour as the thoughts Perennius hid behind a bland expression. Calvus, smooth as an ivory finial, sat in her pose of rigid concentration. The agent could not imagine what the bound woman was trying to accomplish. He hoped that it might be an attempt to keep Sabellia from some suicidal gesture.

Though he knew it was dangerous, the agent said, "King Anulf, if you will release me, I can better discuss my Emperor's offer of gold to your Highness." If Perennius's hands weren't free when the woman cut loose, all of them and the mission were well and truly screwed.

"Hel take you!" Anulf snarled. He stalked off to the ship and the wine still aboard it. Behind him skipped the one-armed man.

After that, the agent had nothing better to do than to watch Sabellia act.

Surely it was an act . . . but gods! it was a good one. And Perennius did not really know her that well, just assumed - felt - her similarity to another Gallic woman of years before.

Well, he hadn't known Julia that well either, as it turned out.

"Eggs!" Sabellia called, snapping a finger against her palm. "Come on, fellows, they kept chickens so there has to be eggs."

"Hoy!" called a Goth. He lifted a largish brown egg from within a bush which he had parted.

"Right, look for nests," the woman encouraged. "We need, oh, one apiece. You're a such big men." Reaching under her cloak, flashing and then hiding her body in a fashion more enticing than her battered nudity of minutes before, Sabellia squeezed the biceps of the men to either side of her. One of them was the towering Theudas, I the other his companion who had held a Herulian from behind for slaughter. "Now, where's the fennel? In all this garden, there must be some fennel."

The entourage made an absurd progress of the whole garden. Burly pirates, the Eagle's murderous opponents less than a day before, paced beside the short woman. They held eggs, sprigs of herbs, and vegetables. Sestius I was sunk in somnolent gloom. Gaius sat bolt upright. His face held a fixed expression while he tried to wear through his bonds by tiny movements against the rough surface of the post.

"Onions, now. No, those are leeks - well, bring them anyway, sure, but there ought to be - there, by the fence, that's right."

Perennius had already determined to his satisfaction that he could lift his post out of the ground if he needed to. The sunken part had rotted enough to permit that. Once the post was out of the way, he could slip his bound wrists under his body. That would be more painful than he cared to think about, what with the spear hole in his thigh, but it was possible too. He did not waste effort on bonds that could not be abraded in useful time anyway. And he did not slip into the black despair that was always useless. Besides, she wasn't Perennius' woman, not this one, not even the other when it came down to cases. . . . Perennius watched, making the basic assumption that there was something to see besides a woman selling herself to the gang that had already raped her in concert for the right to pick and choose her partners the next time.

And even if it were that, sooner or later there would be an opening for Aulus Perennius to act.

"Ah, wild horseradish," Sabellia said. She pointed toward a juniper outside the cleared area. In the juniper's shade grew a moderate-sized plant topped by a spray of hooded yellow flowers. "That one," she directed, "the pretty yellow one. But only bring the root, it'll lie just beneath the surface."

A Goth sprang to obey. He drew his dagger for a makeshift trowel.

"And now, boys . . ." the Gallic woman went on. She paused to squeeze again the arms of her nearest consorts, both of them laden with greens. "Now, the beef!"

The band roared with enthusiasm. It began to tramp toward the bloody carcass.

The agent had not been as hungry as the labor he had done since he last ate would have justified. That was due in part to the chill, first of the sea and then of the night on his damp body. Nausea from the rap on the head had contributed also. The pirates had really not cared whether the folk they dragged from the water lived or died. Perennius suspected that Calvus, still locked in his - her! - trance state had something to do with the fact that the others had not been clubbed as hard as was Perennius himself. They could not have been. At least one would have died of a crushed skull by now if they had all been treated as the agent was.

Sight of the dripping loin brought Perennius' appetite back with a rush, however, though his taste ran more to seafood than to beef when there was an option. Biarni had hacked the muscle out with unexpected skill. Cooking among the barbarians tended to be a process of boiling gobbets of flesh. The originals could be cows, pigs, sheep - or horses, if you happened to be with a raiding party on the eastern steppes. When haste required something different, like grilling, the results was apt to be the sort of disaster the pirates had faced - and had gorged on nevertheless - the night before. The crippled cook had shown despite that a familiarity with the heifer's anatomy. He had even gone beyond his instructions and had skewered the loin on an iron rod from the ship's furniture.

That initiative was a mistake, as Sabellia was quick to inform him. "No, no," she cried, "we're not going to burn this like last night, are we boys?"

There was a chorus of cheers. One pirate aimed a kick at Biarni on general principles. "We need a platter. A big platter or a table."

The platter that two Goths produced was obviously loot and not part of the normal shipboard gear. It was solid silver and over thirty inches in diameter. Sabellia directed it to the ground by pointing her finger. Then she had Biarni slap the meat onto it with a similarly imperious gesture. "Now," she said to the assembled pirates, "who has a knife? A really sharp knife."

Perennius shifted the post with his shoulder, then pulled it forward with his wrists. All eyes were on the woman. The agent thrust upward, wincing at the flexion of his wounded thigh. The post itself would make an adequate club in the chaos of bleeding men jumping away from -

Sabellia took the dagger the blond giant at her side was handing over. She smiled, knelt, and began chopping at the beef with quick, expert movements.

On the beached vessel, Anulf was rumbling drunken curses to himself below the level of the gunwale. Neither Sabellia nor the men around her paid any attention to the chief. Even Biarni seemed fascinated by the woman's skill with the knife. "Call this sharp?" she bantered, tossing the weapon back to its owner after a moment. "Come on, really sharp, I want to shave this, not gnaw it into hunks." Someone else passed her a knife in replacement.

Other pirates began drawing the short blades most of them were wearing. They tested the edges. One enterprising fellow began to sharpen his knife, using a block from the farmhouse's limestone foundation as a whetstone. Soon the smoldering ruin was ringing with Goths scraping at stones with their blades. Some of them were so inexpert that they were dulling such edge as years of neglect had left.

The blond Goth took rejection of his own dagger in good part. As a joke he offered Sabellia the axe with which he had cut her loose. Both of them laughed. The woman reached up and squeezed the pirate's calf while

she muttered a response too low for Perennius to catch. The agent had the post ready to be withdrawn, but there was no point in doing so at the moment. He could not imagine what Sabellia was about - if it were not what it appeared to be.

Whatever the truth might be, the Gallic woman was assuredly a cook as she claimed. She was mincing the loin as fine as the blades she was offered would permit - and some of them were sharp indeed. Even so, the edges dulled as she cut across the grain of muscle fibers, and she continually passed back knives to be resharpened. As Sabellia worked, she tossed occasional pinches of the chopped loin into her mouth. When Goths tried to steal bits as well, she rapped their knuckles with the flat or back of whichever blade she was using at the time. Only Theudas beside her was allowed a taste. She offered it to him to lick off the point of the double-edged dagger she held. Other pirates hooted in glee at the sight.

When about half the eight-pound loin was chopped, Sabellia began calling for sprigs of herbs. She shaved each in turn with tiny movements that rang on the silver tray like rain on tin. As she kneaded in the condiments - tarragon, fenugreek, bits of the long yellow root she had called wild horseradish - she kept up a constant flow of banter and explanation. Her hands were marvellously quick. Though the chopping looked easy, Perennius could well appreciate the strength of the wrist that did it with such apparent effortlessness.

Sestius was crying. The centurion's bonds prevented him from even covering his face with his hands.

Sabellia blended the raw eggs into the meat with the flirtatious showmanship of a female conjuror. She used a broad-bladed knife as her spatula. The knife waved in wide arcs in turning over the mass. Pirates laughed and cursed as they hunted the eggs they had set down to watch the meat-chopping. Several eggs had been stepped on during the interim. That gave the Goths something more to crow about.

The whole process consumed hours. Only the Gallic woman's patter made it seem otherwise. Biarni had built up the cook-fire again. Water was already bubbling in the pot which he hung over the flame from a folding tripod. No one, not even the cook, paid much attention to the chunks of meat boiling there in normal fashion. Sabellia's skill and the show she put on were riveting.

"All right!" she said at last. She handed to its owner the knife which she had just swirled the final egg into the mass. Using both palms and her closed fingers, Sabellia spread the chopped loin and spices across the circular tray. Her steel blades had irreparably scarred the engraving on the softer silver. The damage had reduced the tray to no more than its value as metal. The German raiders had not cared. To them, the Mediterranean Basin was full of things of beauty to be stolen and smashed and replaced with further loot. The fact that the Gallic woman had destroyed the tray without a qualm implied a sense of ruthless purpose in her that Perennius could appreciate; but the agent still did not understand where it was leading.

When she had the loin spread evenly over the tray, Sabellia snapped her fingers and pointed to retrieve the broad-bladed knife. The surface of the meat varied from the wet gray of portions that had been open to the air for some time to the rich purple of the most freshly-chopped muscle. The well-mixed eggs bound the flesh and spices, giving the whole the texture more of a fruit dish than of meat.

"All right," Sabellia repeated. She began to divide the mass with the back of her knife. There was another cheer from her entourage. Pirates crowded closer, kicking sand toward the dish. The woman shouted and snatched it up. She gave the tray to the huge blond to hold as she finished separating the portions. "One apiece, damn you!" she called good-naturedly. She began handing out the spiced loin with her free hand and the knife blade.

Goths with sticky patties of meat in their hands tended to try to gulp them there at the tray. Their unfed fellows quickly jostled them aside. "Hey!" Sabellia called, "where's the captain?"

"Hel take Anulf!" cried someone from the press. "I'll eat his too!"

"Maybe Anulf's got his own raw meat in the boat!"

Theudas suggested loudly. "Maybe Grim's got three legs to make up for only one arm."

"Whew gods it's hot!" somebody added amid the laughter. "Where's the fucking wine?"

The movement of pirates toward the ship was more a saunter than a charge. It obviously boded ill for the chieftain none the less. The Goths had let out their frustrations the night before against the Herulians. Their situation was not the better in the morning. Theudas saw personal advantage to himself in directing the frustration this time toward the chief who had led them into the disastrous fight with the liburnian.

Anulf's one-armed companion stood and faced his fellows with an uncertain smile. A pirate reached over the gunwale and snatched Grim out of the ship by his leg. "Come on, Grim," he roared, "it's good and it'll grow hair on your stump!"

Grim was not a small man despite his handicap, but when three more of the pirates seized him, he covered his frown with a smile. "Sure, guys," he said. "I'm hungry." He scurried over to the small group still around Sabellia.

Anulf stood up with his sword drawn. His face in its fury was the same mottling of gray and purple as the platter of chopped loin. "Right," he said in a thick voice. "And who'll be the first to try stuffing that filth down my throat?"

Half a dozen of the pirates were close enough that they might have reacted immediately. Anulf was wearing his armor, however. The old scars on his face and forearm were a reminder of all of them of the truculence that had made him their leader in the first place. The gunwale was only three feet above the beach, low enough for any of the band to leap. Any of the band willing to lose both legs to a sword-stroke.

Theudas shifted almost imperceptibly, twenty feet away from his chief. Sabellia was now holding the tray and the remnant of the meat. The blond Goth's right arm moved slowly. Perennius could not see what Theudas was doing because the big man's body hid it; but the agent understood the signs very well.

"You, Respa?" the chieftain demanded. He jabbed in the direction of the gray-bearded veteran nearest him. The pirate indicated by the long sword jumped back. He knew as well as Anulf did that the chieftain could not fight them all. He knew also that the first man to rush would be spitted on Anulf's sword.

When the chieftain's sword and eyes flicked toward Respa, Theudas acted. He brought his arm and the axe it held around in a fast overhead throw. Anulf saw the glitter out of the corner of his eye. He leaped back with a shout and a crash of equipment. The axe-helve spun in the arc it drew around the polished head. The bitt that caught Anulf on the forehead rotated another fraction of a turn as well, splitting the septum of the chieftain's nose before it and he smashed to stillness on the deck.

"Hail King Theudas!" Sabellia cried in a high voice.

Respa had drawn his own sword as he jumped away from Anulf's. Now he studied the bigger, blond man for 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 façades 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.

"Now, Sabellia," Perennius whispered to the woman. She was huddled against the post to which she had earlier been tied.

Flies had buzzed around the dish of chopped loin even while Sabellia was preparing it. They coated the remnants of the confection in the dirt. Many of the insects lay on their backs, quivering with bursts of furious motion but unable to fly or even to crawl. The ground was black besides with still forms which were beyond even that. Their systems had been destroyed as thoroughly as those of the Goths, by the aconite root which Sabellia had called "wild horseradish."

The Gallic woman moved swiftly to Perennius. She knelt behind the fence post as Theudas turned. The Goth's surmise became furious certainty. Sabellia cut the thongs at the agent's elbows, then those at his wrists, with quick passes of the knife. To its broad blade still clung smears of the poisoned meat which she had served with the weapon.

Perennius stood and took the knife. The woman tried to hand him her cloak as well, to wrap around his arm in place of a shield. "Get the hell out of the way!" the agent shouted. He braced his left hand against the top of the post. Perennius was stiff, but a bow is stiff also and it kills none the less....

Theudas charged. He had drawn his axe even before his eyes lighted on Sabellia. The Goth was no berserker, but sight of the slender woman who had played him for a fool drove him momentarily over the edge. The glint of dark steel in Perennius' hand brought Theudas up again. The woman scampered nude into the trampled garden.

"Sure, try me first," the agent said with a smile. "You aren't afraid of me, are you? Just because your mother used to suck my cock when we were - "

Theudas leaped forward again with a swing of his axe.

Between the length of the axe helve and that of the arm which swung it, the glittering head covered an arc with a seven-foot radius. The blow skimmed short of Perennius. The agent could not take advantage of his opponent's imbalance because of the injured leg and a knife as his sole weapon. Instead, Perennius slid behind the post that had held him a moment before. A length of thong still dangled from the agent's right wrist. He laughed at Theudas.

If Perennius had a shield available, he would have carried it - though even that might have failed the test. The agent had a professional respect for Theudas' arm and the weight of the Goth's weapon. A cloak wrapped around the forearm was a good makeshift in some circumstances. It could envelope a sword-edge and cushion its blow in multiple layers of cloth. Against the Goth and his axe, the most a cloak would have done was to act as a ready compress for Perennius' severed arm. The agent could have flung the garment like a retiarius in the arena, but the cloak was not a weighted net. Theudas' long left arm would have swept it aside in the air. The agent might have gained a fraction of a second - which his right leg would not permit him to exploit. Instead he stuck to one simple thing: a post stuck in the ground which the Goth could not knock down even in the fury of his charge.

Theudas cursed and sidled around the obstacle to the left. The Goth held his axe in front of him with both hands. The bitts were level with his eyes and ready to chop or thrust.

Perennius duplicated the Goth's movements perfectly. The agent moved a little faster than his opponent because the threat of the axe kept him slightly further from the post than was their common center. In theory, Theudas could have reached him over the post with the axe. The fencepost would have blocked the Goth's lunge, however, and it would have left his wrists extended to Perennius' knife if the stroke had missed. The big man cursed and moved; and the Illyrian moved in concert, giving a rich, false laugh.

The warrior had an audience. Gaius was showing sense enough to hold as still as the post to which he was bound, thank the unconquered Sun. The courier might have made Theudas stumble, but the agent could not have exploited such a misstep. Any such reminder of the captives' presence would have brought a swift, downward blow from the frustrated Goth - which Perennius could have done nothing to prevent.

But there were Germans still alive, too. Lest Theudas should forget them, Sabellia crowed, "Say, mighty chieftain! Your boys don't seem to be helping you. Why don't you tell a few of them to crawl over and puke on the Roman's boots? He's so much bigger than you alone, after all!"

Despite himself, Theudas glanced back at his men. Storar, doubled up on the ground, stared at his chief with eyes glazed by pain and horror. Respa had followed his pebble on hands and knees into the side of the ship. He was still trying to crawl after the stone. Every time Respa lurched forward, he struck his head on the hull. Then he would pause and do the same thing again . . . and again. . . . The rest of the crew lay in various contorted poses like driftwood on the sand. Many of the Goths moaned or twitched, but a few were as still as logs already.

Theudas roared and slammed into the chest-high post as he swung at the agent.

Perennius threw himself beneath the horizontal arc of the blow instead of stepping back as he had before. It was a dangerous move, but the Illyrian knew the post would interfere with the Goth's ability to strike low. As the axe hissed above him, Perennius slashed upward with the speed of a weasel lunging. The agent's leg was stiff, but there was nothing wrong with his arms or his timing. The knife scored the bones of Theudas' left wrist. The axe-head's inertia pulled it through the rest of its arc while blood sprayed the ground.

The agent rolled to his feet and smiled. He held up the gory blade. "It was poisoned, you know," he said.

Theudas screamed and hurled his axe. Unlike Anulf, Perennius was expecting that.

The blond Goth had arms like a catapult's. The axe-blade would have sheared a metal-faced shield and the forearm beneath it if it had connected. The weapon's mass was also its drawback. When Theudas had committed his full strength to the throw, there was no way that even he could deflect it to follow the agent's sidestep. The axe was still spinning and airborne thirty feet beyond Perennius when it split a post across the garden.

Then it was the agent's turn.

Storar was the closest of the Goths to their chieftain. There was a sword belted to the poisoned man's shuddering body. Theudas would have bent to draw the weapon, but he saw Perennius out of the corner of his eye. The agent, half the Goth's bulk and shorter by fifteen inches, was charging.

Theudas roared and kicked out chest-high. Perennius was waiting for that, too. The agent twisted sideways and grabbed the big foot with his left hand. The maneuver put massive stress on the agent's own right leg, but all that mattered for the moment was that the leg hold him up for a half second. The pain did not matter, never mattered in a situation like that. . . . Perennius drew his knife through the soft leather and the Goth's Achilles tendon, hamstringing the big man.

Theudas jerked himself clear. His murderous roar had become a shout of surprise. He did not feel the pain as yet. The knife had been only a hot line, a twinge that could have come from bones twisting in the agent's grip. Then the huge Goth planted his foot firmly and it collapsed under him. He bellowed as he pitched sideways. Perennius was on him.

It is easy to kill with a knife. A single deep stab into the body cavity is as apt to do it as not . . . but the death may be days later. The very sharpness of the point is a handicap, for the tissues clamp down on the metal that parts them and seal off the gushing fluids that would otherwise follow the blade's withdrawal. Sometimes blood seeps into the body cavity like water from a badly-packed valve. At other times, an oozing trail of waste from a punctured bowel permits an early semblance of recovery before fever finally carries the victim off.

To kill quickly with a knife, you must slash. That is not easy at all when your opponent is a warrior of Theudas's strength.

The Goth fell sideways, but despite his surprise he managed to twist so that he was facing Perennius. His hands were high. The agent threw himself across Theudas' upper chest. Perennius' left hand grabbed a swatch of the pirate's long blond hair. The big man's arms locked around Perennius' chest and squeezed. Snakes kill by keeping their victims' lungs from expanding, thus suffocating them as effectively as a noose around the throat. Theudas, on the other hand, was strong enough to splinter ribs and kill in a spray of blood from bone-torn organs. The Goth tightened his hold. Perennius stabbed hilt-deep, just above the chieftain's pubis bone. The agent let his own terror of

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constriction draw the edge up through Theudas' belly until it lodged in a rib.

The Goth screamed. Even now, the pain was buried under cushions of shock. Theudas' lower body felt as if it had been liquefied and was flowing from his bones in warm ripples. He flung Perennius away from him easily and sat up. The Goth stared at his wound with the amazement of an atheist viewing a miracle. The knife had parted sheets of muscle for ten inches up the long torso. The severed fibers contracted, pulling the wound open into an oval a hand's breadth wide in the middle. Blood and pink intestine coiled through the opening.

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 proof of the dedication of simple villagers who had executed so impressive a monument to their god without help from the outside.

At the moment, villagers were running toward the church from the common wheat field and from the garden plots terraced up the hillside. Black-faced sheep were blurs on the crest above, but the herdsmen must already have joined the general flow toward the tower.

The one exception was a man in a black robe which fluttered as he kicked his donkey toward the newcomers. As the villager approached, he tried to keep his left hand raised. The gold or gilded cross which he held wavered and jerked as the donkey beneath him trotted.

"A brave man," Gaius commented as he watched the envoy. The courier glanced up at the outcrop from which they had been spotted initially. The rock was behind them now and he, like Perennius, was wondering if the lookout was still hidden in their rear.

"Three years ago, friends of mine were burned alive for refusing to sacrifice," Sabellia said grimly. "Then the Lord chose to spare me for his future works, so I wasn't requested to sacrifice to idols when others were. Why do you think Christians would fear death by bandits when we go to our pyres singing hymns of praise?"

"At least they've got donkeys to sell," remarked Sestius, possibly to put a cap on the present discussion. "I'll be damned glad to get off my own feet. Especially with the load of metal we're carrying - not that I'm complaining."

"Yeah, well," said the agent. "No reason for any of us to talk about what we picked up from the pirates. I don't doubt these folk are religious - " he nodded to the Gallic woman, keeping his face still and his eyes serious - "but there's no advantage to our putting temptation in their way. We'll offer them fair prices and as much more as it takes to get the animals ... but we don't need to tell them just how much bullion we're hauling around."

The agent was a little worried about Sabellia. Her faith had not been a secret before. Not from him, at least. He was used to the point of reflex to correlating data - expressions, gestures; the scraps of personal details that come out inevitably when a group of people live in each other's wallets for weeks at a time. If Perennius' mission had involved ferreting out Christians, he would . . . but the agent's mind shied away from that thought in which business conflicted with something more personal and less common to him. In any case, Perennius had little enough use for gods that he could not get concerned by the foibles of those people who felt differently. If Sabellia refused to sacrifice to the Emperor who served and represented the Empire - then Perennius also served and represented the Empire. The Gallic woman had saved his life, and that was already more of a benefit to the Emperor than a pinch of frankincense on a charcoal fire.

But they were all under stress, even the ice-calm Calvus. If being catapulted into a community of fellow-believers put Sabellia off on some unforeseeable religious tangent, it might cost the party her services. It might cost Perennius her presence ... and Perennius looked away from her, toward the man on the donkey, to avoid the direction his thoughts were taking.

The rider reined up noisily, ten feet short of Perennius' party. The five of them had shifted instinctively into a ragged line abreast. All of them were looking determinedly non-violent. The agent had grounded his Gothic spear point-first in the soil. The shaft was taking much of his weight. His right thigh throbbed while he walked on it but when he stood still the feeling became agony if the limb had to support his body.

The man in the dark robe raised his cross. Most of his scalp had been shaven, though the hair surrounding the tonsure was black and bushy. "If you come in peace, travellers," he said, "the blessings of the Annointed and of Dioscholias his servant be upon you." Surprisingly, the man spoke in the local form of Syriac instead of the

Greek Perennius had expected even this far back in the hills.

Stumblingly, the agent answered in the same Cilician dialect. "We are peaceful travellers, sir. Traders who expect to pay well for the food and beasts of burden we hope to buy from you." Sestius was Cilician, and the Illyrian was fairly certain that Calvus could speak the language with the same facility that she had shown with every other tongue they had encountered. Perennius did not trust them to carry on the negotiations, however; and he had learned never to use an interpreter if there were any possibility of avoiding it. At best, an interpreter added a third personality to the discussion in hand.

The villager slid from his donkey and knelt. He folded both his hands in front of him over the stem of the crucifix and prayed. "Thanks be to Jesus the Anointed, font of all blessings, and to his servant Dioscholias who first brought his teachings to our valley." The man stood again and said in a more businesslike tone, "Strangers, I am Father Ramphion, a disciple of the blessed Dioscholias, and his successor when he was translated to the throne of God. The Lord has blessed us by sending you into our midst. Come, join us in the love feast that is being prepared in your honor and in God's." Ramphion gestured toward the huts.

"Father, we thank you," the agent replied. "I am Aulus Perennius, and these are the companions of my journey." He introduced the others, giving their real names - or in the case of Calvus, the false male name that was all Perennius knew her by. "We will be glad of your hospitality." He smiled. "I had expected your fellows were engaged in another sort of preparations, after the warning gong."

"Oh, here," Father Ramphion said, offering Perennius the donkey's reins. "You're injured. You should not be walking."

"Actually, I think it's better for the leg that I do use it," the agent said. "But perhaps Sabellia ... ?"

The discussion degenerated at once into multiple refusals of the offer. The donkey, unconcerned, tugged from Ramphion's hand to the roadside to crop grass growing between the track and the wheat beyond. Abruptly, Sestius ended the nonsense by accepting the charity and mounting the beast. Perennius felt like an idiot for having wasted time and let matters get out of hand in such a ridiculous way. The agent never knew how to deal with generosity.

Perhaps he was fortunate that generosity was so rarely to be met with.

Father Ramphion had not forgotten the question Perennius had earlier implied, though. As the two men plodded after the mounted centurion, Ramphion said, "Of course, we're prepared to defend ourselves if needs be. To help God defend us, I should rather say." He gestured toward the church. There were unglazed windows in the second and third levels of the stepped tower. The agent could now see that the only openings in the twenty-foot high base cylinder were the front door and a circuit of arrow slits at shoulder height in the stone wall. A proper military force with artillery and battering rams could take the structure without serious difficulty. A band of raiders like those the Eagle had fallen among would have turned away after an abortive assault or two against the stone. The church would preserve the villagers and such movable property as they could get inside it.

"But that has not occurred as yet, thank the Lord." Ramphion continued. "All of those strangers who have come to the valley since Dioscholias brought God's teachings here have been like yourselves. Men of peace, wanderers ... some poor souls displaced and brutalized by the scourges that wrack the sinful world beyond. May they all find peace in God."

The valley itself certainly appeared to have found peace. Stacks of hay still remained from the previous year's harvest, though there must have been fresh pasturage for the village's flocks for over a month now. The common sheepfold was extensive; a gray, freestone structure adjacent to the human habitations. Smoke drifted above the valley wall, but Perennius could not pinpoint its source against the blur of rock and dull green vegetation. The valley was the sort of place that Sestius had described as being his dream and prayer of finding in his native province.

With that thought in mind, Perennius asked the villager. "Ah, are you all Christians here? That is - the church looks as if it would have been an enormous task, even with everyone in the village concentrating on it."

Father Ramphion nodded. He appeared to be older than the agent had at first believed him to be; perhaps even in his mid-forties. His limbs were strong and his fringe of hair had a youthful luster. "Not quite all of us, no," he said. "There are two brothers in the village, Azon and Erzites, who follow the appalling idolatry of their father. The rest of us, yes, we are followers of the Anointed."

Ramphion raised his eyes toward the spire of the church. What must be most of the populace of the village was lining up in front of the structure, men to the right of the doorway and women to the left. "It was a marvellous work, barely completed when Dioscholias was translated to heaven five years ago. Only the Saved had a hand in the building, of course. Azon and Erzites are victims of a particularly foul error. They claim to be Christians also, but they worship the Anointed in the form of the Serpent of Eden."

"Ah, Ophitics," agreed the agent. "Yes, serpent-worship is more common on the Black Sea coast than it is this far in the south."

"It's more common yet in Hell," Ramphion asserted tartly. In a more moderate tone he added, "But Azon and Erzites have their place in the valley. They are on Earth to advance the purposes of the Lord, as is every creature which he placed here. Blessed by the Lord!"

As if Ramphion's words were a signal, the assembled villagers chorused, "Blessed by the Anointed and his servant Dioscholias!" They surged forward, draping Sestius and the others behind him with garlands of field-flowers.

The next hour and a half were a confused blur of hymns and offers of hospitality. The village had no bathhouse as a settlement a little larger would have. Instead, the villagers led Perennius and the others to a tub quarried from the living rock to take advantage of a warm spring. To the agent, the offer was as tempting as the thought of sex to a sailor. It was only at the last instant that Perennius thought

to refuse - on the grounds that he and Calvus had vowed to Hermes that they would not bathe until they reached Tarsus. Otherwise, the tall woman would have been alone in refusing to disrobe. That would not have mattered to the agent - had not mattered or even been noticed in past months - were it not for his present awareness of Calvus' sex. Logically, Perennius could have accepted without concern a situation which had not caused problems while he was ignorant of it. Perennius - and humans in general, he suspected - were not built to feel that way, however.

Gaius and Sestius splashed and bellowed happily. Their voices were thrown across the valley by the concave rocks. Sabellia sat a few paces down from the tub and waited her turn in the water. Mixed bathing was the norm in large cities - or was. at least a common option. Sabellia was a rural woman, however, with a rustic sense of propriety which cropped up unexpectedly. Perennius looked back at the red-haired woman, huddled beneath the bathing hollow. He could remember - he could not forget - her drooling beneath Theudas and the panting Herulian. Perennius' knuckles banded red and white with the pressure of his grip on his spear. The villagers leading him and Calvus to a hut twittered in sudden alarm at the agent's expression. Then the moment passed, and Aulus Perennius was again a peaceful traveller, to whom weapons were a necessary burden and no more.

The villagers' own attitude toward mixed bathing was a surprise to Perennius. They had obviously expected all five of their guests to share the big tub simultaneously. Christ cultists had something of a reputation for strait-laced behavior. There were scores of variant cults, however - the priest's mention of the two Ophitics living in the valley was an example. Certainly there was nothing about the villagers' demeanor to suggest that they thought of common bathing as anything more than an exercise in cleanliness. Prurience required a level of sophistication which seemed blissfully lacking in the valley.

"Here, sir," said one of the women who was guiding them. Father Ramphion was busy elsewhere, it seemed. The woman opened the door of a dwelling. She stepped aside quickly so that Perennius would not brush her as he

entered. The shutters were thrown back from the unglazed window. The front room's southern exposure lighted it brightly. The room was not clean, exactly - nothing with a dirt floor and a thatched roof could ever be clean in an absolute sense - but it had been swept out only minutes before. A haze of dust motes clung to the air, and a heavy-set woman with a straw broom stood panting outside the door. This was obviously an occupied dwelling whose owners had been whisked away with all their personalty to make room for the strangers.

Perennius ducked as he stepped inside. In general, the roof was high enough for him - it would not be for Calvus - but the thatching sloped down from the back where it joined the hillside.

"Beds will be brought shortly, sirs," a villager said through the open window. Its sill and the door jamb showed that the walls were of stones a foot thick. They had been squared ably with a pick or adze but without any attempt at polishing. The craftsmanship impressed the agent even before he stepped into the room adjoining to the rear and realized that it had been entirely carven into the rock of the hill.

"Look at this," Perennius murmured to Calvus as the tall woman moved to his side. The agent ran his palm down a wall that was plumb enough to suit a temple architect. Its surface showed that it had been hacked from living rock with a pick. The incredible labor involved had not caused the job to be skimped, either. The ceiling of the back room was high enough that Calvus could stand upright.

The room was somewhat less dark than the agent would have guessed. Some light entered from the front room. There was no door separating the two rooms, only an open archway cut in the wall. Besides that, there was a slanting flue cut in the ceiling to exit from the hillside at some point above the thatching of the front extension. The flue was narrow, but it let in enough light to see by, even this late in the evening. The back room had been cleaned with the same thoroughness as the front. Its walls were colored the soft, indelible black of soot from the hearth sunk in the middle of the floor. Not only would the