Birds of Prey (30 page)

Father Ramphion had been leaning much of his own weight on the table. Villagers, one of them the young man who had brought the goblet, stepped close to the priest as the panel was removed. Ramphion straightened slowly. He did not need the hands that hovered in nervous helpfulness near his elbows. “Praise be to God,” he said, enunciating very distinctly.

“Praise be to God!” rattled the response of his congregation among the curves of the chamber.

No one bothered to move the drugged victims from where they sprawled. The sound in Perennius's ears was taking on the magnitude of the roaring surf. The scene was becoming darker though no less sharply defined. Four villagers, one of them a husky woman, were carrying a naked, bawling stranger toward the pillar behind Father Ramphion. Other villagers plucked the rush-candles from sconces on the same pillar. A crucified man was painted garishly against the double-lobed surface of the column. The sconces, Perennius noticed now, were of heavy iron. They were set into the wrists of the painted figure.

“Dear God,” wailed the stranger in Greek. “I'm a Christian! You
mustn't
do this!” His nude body was pale and soft-looking. Folds in the skin of his abdomen suggested recent privation. Someone's house-slave, run away from Tarsus or even further to a valley of fellow-believers? Or perhaps a government official, making quiet inquiries into the district's tax rolls? In any case, a man alone or in a small group, charmed no doubt by the hospitality offered by these jovial sectarians.…

“‘This is my body, that is broken for you,' saith the Anointed,” Father Ramphion recited. His voice was made squeaky either by the drug he had taken or by the dose now ringing like a carillon in Perennius' ears. “So must we break the bodies of the unbelievers who oppressed him, that the Anointed may return to rule on Earth. All praise be to God, and to Dioscholias who taught his commandments to us!”

“Praise to God!” trembled and blended with the screams of the man who was about to be sacrificed.

The villagers who held the man had no difficulty with either the victim's weight or his struggles. At the pillar, the pair holding his arms lifted them. Two more villagers, taller than the norm, seized the victim's wrists and began lashing them to the sconces. The step at the feet of the painted figure was not itself painted, but rather a brief curb jutting from the surface of the stone. A real victim could rest his feet and weight on the curb until fatigue dragged him off to die of suffocation.

Someone with Calvus' length of leg could stand flatfooted on the ground, the agent thought. Perhaps they would break her shins before they tied her up.…

The goblet which had held the drug had now been refilled with wine as red as blood. Father Ramphion raised it and began intoning a prayer to which his congregation shouted responses. The victim screamed, thumping his wrists against the stone and iron which held them. As the scene receded into blackness, Perennius was telling himself dizzily that this sort of behavior was a threat to the Empire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Hercules,” Perennius muttered, though the process of coming around was no worse than that of being awakened from a sound sleep. His toes and fingers tingled, and there was still the buzzing somewhere in his head. There was no particular pain, however. In fact, the drugging seemed to have helped the agent's previous collection of aches and throbbing, including that of his spear wound.

Two hands steadied Perennius as he rose to a sitting position, Calvus on one side and Sabellia on the other. In the light creeping through the room's grated door, the agent could see the forms of Gaius and Sestius. They were slumped and snoring. All five of the party now wore simple belted tunics of local manufacture, like those the two soldiers had donned even before the feast. The agent wondered whether Calvus' sex had caused any surprise this time. The pirates, after all, had seemed to take the revelation in stride. Perennius shuddered and said, “Hercules!” again.

The light was dim, but the agent's eyes were fully dark-adapted. “Just like the room they gave us to store things,” he said. “Except that one didn't have a barred door, did it?”

He stood. Sabellia murmured a warning. The Illyrian tried a step anyway and lurched, grabbing the door for support with a crash. The door was of welded iron bars with no interstices more than a hand's-breadth apart. Crossbars braced the verticals, inside and out. Like the church, the door was of obviously local design and manufacture. Equally like the church, the door looked more than solid enough for its intended purpose. As for the living rock that formed the ceiling, floor, and walls—

Perennius saw the shadow of the cudgel slashing at his knuckles just in time to jerk his hand away from the bars. The knobby length of root crashed against the iron. It filled the stone chamber with its vicious cacophony. “Next chappie to touch the door,” said a harsh voice, “is the first to go when they need more meat down there.” The speaker who had suddenly bulked against the light on the other side of the bars made a gesture with his thumb. “Make my life hard and I'll make yours a little shorter,” he added with a chuckle. “And if the week or two's difference don't seem like much now, it will, chappies. Hear the voice of experience. It
will.
”

“Sorry, friend,” said the agent easily. “I just tripped. The gods know, I've got enough problems of my own right now. I'm not looking to make problems for anybody else.” Perennius stood inches back from the grating. He was shifting his weight unobtrusively from one leg to the other to work the life back into the muscles.

Like the other hut, this one had two rooms. The outer one was built out from the hillside, while the inner one was set into the rock with only the doorway and a flue to connect it with the rest of the world. Judging from the patch of gray sky at the end of it, this flue was much like the other one: ten feet long and too narrow to pass a man's clenched fist. That left the iron-grated door which looked beyond affecting with bare hands even if there were no guard present. Since there was a guard, however, there were additional possibilities.

“Hey, don't worry,” the big Cilician said with a laugh. “Your problems'll be over pretty quick now, won't they?” He walked back to a couch along one of the sidewalls.

“You'd be Azon, then, I guess,” the agent said. The guard was slope-shouldered and covered from elbows to wrists with curling black hair. His appearance was striking enough that Perennius could be fairly certain that the fellow had not been in the church earlier. Besides, the man had a coarseness to him that set him apart from the other villagers. He looked like what the rest had proved themselves in fact to be: a red-handed murderer.

The guard turned to face Perennius again. The light from the single oil lamp on the floor opposite him fell slantingly across his face. “That's close,” he said. His hand worked menacingly on his cudgel. “It's Erzites. And just what might you know about that, chappie?”

“Hey, friend,” Perennius said. His raised his palms in a gesture of innocence though he knew the bars hid him from the guard more than the reverse. “Nothing meant at all. Life's too short, right? It's just that before I went under, I heard Ramphion say something about hauling us out to Azon, shits to a shit. I don't mean—”

The cudgel whipped out and slammed the door again. Erzites followed the blow with a kick that must have hurt even though he hit the iron with his sandaled heel instead of his toe. “Those goddam bastards say that?” he shouted. “Goddam, I think sometimes we ought to—” He caught himself, breathing heavily. “Well,” he said, “they can say what they like. But I know who the
really
smart ones in this valley are.”

A less experienced man might have pressed Erzites further, while his anger boiled and waited to be released at the nearest target. Perennius instead moved back from the door. Sabellia was massaging the limbs of her man and murmuring quietly. The bands of light which fell across her were too pale to bring out the colors of her skin and hair. With his mind on other things, the agent knelt beside Gaius and began working to arouse him also.

“Have you had a chance to look at the bars?” Perennius asked in low-voiced German.

“Yes, Aulus Perennius,” Calvus responded where someone else might have added, “of course.” She reached past Perennius and began kneading Gaius, under the tunic as if direct contact with his flesh were important. Perennius filed the fact with the way the woman's hands had drawn much of the fire from his thigh as she bandaged him. “The welds are all too solid for me to break them with my bare hands in these cramped quarters.”

“Hey, you can't tell that by glancing at it in the dark!” Perennius objected. The courier was beginning to make conscious noises beneath the agent's hands—or more probably, beneath Calvus'. “Even if it's not dark to you,” Perennius amended, reminded to his unease that there were facets of the tall woman which were closed to him. “There may be scale in the middle of the best-looking joint in the world. Put pressure on it and it'll snap like glass. It's not like you can see
through
iron, after all … is it?”

“Damn, what the hell's going on?” Gaius muttered. He tried to roll over so that he could look at the people touching him. His own hands did not quite have the degree of feeling which would permit them to support him.

“No, I wasn't raised to see through iron,” the tall woman said. Perennius could not be sure whether or not there was humor in her voice. “When the guard struck the grating, though, it rattled as a unit—not as so many discrete bars. They must have been very careful in their work. If one bar could be loosened, I could use it to snap a hole in the remainder; but that doesn't seem to be the case.”

“Yeah, bastards are careful, all right,” the agent muttered. He lifted Gaius into a sitting posture, ignoring the younger man's repeated demands for information. “And you can tell that just by hearing a club hit it?”

“Yes, Aulus Perennius,” the tall woman said patiently. She slid herself over to Sestius. The Gallic woman had been listening to the conversation as she continued to massage the centurion.

“All right,” Perennius said. “Would the club be enough of a lever to get things started?”

Calvus paused and looked out into the other room. Erzites was invisible from where she knelt, but the cudgel leaning against his bed was in her line of sight. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps.”

“Well, something better may turn up … and it may not,” the agent muttered. “I figure we'll go with what we've got.” He snorted under his breath. “What we're going to have if we get lucky.” He stood up again and walked to the door. He was careful not to touch the metal.

Erzites noticed the motion. One large, hairy hand gripped the end of the cudgel, though the villager neither spoke nor moved further at the moment. Behind Perennius, Sestius was beginning to groan into wakefulness. The agent called in a mild voice, “How long's it going to be before they decide to kill us, Erzites?”

The cudgel head tapped the floor lightly while the villager made a decision as to how to react. At last he got up and walked toward the grating. Light reflected by the bars would make Perennius behind them little more than a voice and a blur. At last Erzites said, “When the Lord sends them a sacrifice—so they say—they spend as long in church, praying and singing, as it takes him to die. Him or her,” the villager corrected himself.

Erzites fingered the coin he wore as a medallion. It hung by a thong reeved through a hole punched in its rim. It was a Termessian double obol, old enough to be real silver and so worn that the snakes intertwined on its obverse were only a pattern of shadows. “Fucking sick, I call it,” the guard continued, “but it's their business.… Mostly it's one at a time or two. You lot were rare, getting that many who really wouldn't be missed. But who's to say you ever got clear of the pirates, Ramphion puts it to me when I wonder? And it's their business, my brother and me we just watch the larder.”

Perennius nodded encouragingly. He was wondering whether he would have an opportunity to torture the guard before killing him.

“They won't come for any of you while the last one's still alive,” Erzites went on. “That'll take, who knows? Maybe three days? Had one flat croak when they clamped him to the wall a couple years ago.…” The guard frowned and began counting with his left index finger against the fingers wrapped around the grip of his club. “Maybe it was four years ago?” he said in puzzlement. “But I figure you got a while yet. Way this last one bellered when they dragged him out, he ain't going to croak for a while.”

Perennius noticed that while the villager was no longer showing any particular hostility toward his charges, neither was he coming incautiously close. Any attempt to grab Erzites through the bars would fail a foot short, even given the length of Calvus' slender arms.

“Why, they'd be lost without you and your brother, wouldn't they?” prompted the agent. He was careful to avoid any suggestion of treachery. It wasn't time for that yet, especially since Perennius had not yet figured out what sort of offer might be attractive to someone in Erzites' position.

“Too damn right!” the villager agreed with a series of vigorous nods. “Why, they'd go nuts trying to pick who'd watch the meat and who'd watch the road. Figure they'd be damned to bloody Hell if they missed the vigil, so they call it. Course it's damned hard lines for Azon and me when they get big eyes the way they did with you lot.” He spat against the bars, but the anger behind the gesture was clearly directed at Ramphion and his sectaries rather than at their imprisoned victims. “Talk about freezing your butt off up there on the rock…” Erzites continued. “And it's no damn pleasure being stuck here with the meat, either, every damn hour I'm
not
up there.” He jerked his cudgel, presumably toward the head of the valley. It was an angry, sexual gesture.