Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  “Did you see me before that, too?” the woman rasped back. Her right hand gripped Perennius’ shoulder. He could feel her tremble like an arrow drawn to the head. “Did you watch them rape me, Quintus? Twenty-three times. I counted every one, I could only count.… Did you want that to go on every day until I—don’t you turn your head away! Every day till I bled out! Is that what you wanted?”

  “I’m sorry, Bella,” the centurion had mumbled.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she snapped back. “Act like a man and it won’t happen again.”

  The Cilician had nodded. “All right,” he said, “all right.”

  Now the guard turned to his charges. They had waited until he got up and tore off a piece of a loaf from the hamper of food near the lamp. Every moment’s delay increased the risk that the current victim would die and the congregation would come out in force to choose another. The escape attempt would certainly fail, however, if Erzites were angry at being awakened. Even now there was a hostile rasp in the guard’s voice as he replied, “You’ll get food when I’m damned good and ready to feed you.”

  “Naw, not like that,” Sestius said in a clumsy attempt to be ingratiating. Perennius was moving slowly to the grating by the centurion’s side. “Look, you can’t have much fun with these crazies, right?” Sestius continued. “I don’t mean just wine. I mean sex. I’ll bet you’ve never been laid, not the way a man as strong as you has a right to be.”

  The guard began to laugh unexpectedly. He walked toward the door, slapping his club against his palm. There was real humor in Erzites’ laugh. The twitching cudgel was a motion and not a threat. “Say,” he said, “I’ll bet you’re going to offer to get my ashes hauled, ain’t you? Going to have one of the women do it, or do you figure I’d rather have the kid? Sure, I’m going to open the door for that. Or maybe you were going to say I could just stick my cock through the bars and let somebody get his teeth in it?” Erzites slammed the knotted head of his club against the iron in another burst of anger. “You think I haven’t heard it?” he shouted. “You think I haven’t heard it all?”

  In Perennius’ right hand was a shard from the waste jar. The two pottery vessels were the only source of solid weight in the cell. Calvus had broken the waste receptacle by the pressure of her fingers on the rim. There had been a popping sound like that of the tendons of a knee going out, but there was no sharp crash to bring the guard’s attention. Erzites would not have taken any action—if the prisoners wanted to slide in their own slops, that was their business. But it would have made the guard curious and even more cautious than before.

  “Look, I’m going to tell you,” Erzites was saying. He was dangerously cheerful, in charge and aware of it. The Cilician had dropped the chunk of bread in his flash of anger. Now he picked it up, wiped it on his trousers, and took a bite. Erzites’ teeth were as strong and yellow as a camel’s. “The old man made do with what came in trade, sure, and that was damn all,” the guard said through the wad of bread. “None of the others—” “others” tripped out so naturally as a term for the sectaries that it was obviously the one the brothers used between themselves—“would give him the time, of course, and the bastards wouldn’t let him keep a pretty one around until the next lot came through. Not even after Ma died.”

  The villager walked back to the hamper and drew out a skin of water. He was obviously pleased to have an audience. Perennius suspected that Father Ramphion and his fellows circumscribed to the extent possible all intercourse, not just sexual, with the two Ophitics. Out of the guard’s sight, behind the rock of the wall, the agent was carefully coiling again the sash tied around the potsherd. Perennius would have liked to double the length, but he was afraid that a knot in the middle of the line would throw off his cast.

  “Well, the old man knew some field expedients from his army days,” Erzites continued. He smirked. The guard was obviously relaxed, but the habit of caution was so well ingrained that even now he remained at a safe distance from the bars. “Brought me and my brother up on it, too. Donkeys.” He pumped his cudgel up and down. “And I tell you, women don’t compare to a stump-broke jenny. Nor boys, neither, though the others wouldn’t let us use them since my brother wasted one.” Erzites frowned at the memory. “Weren’t his fault the brat bled out.”

  Perennius had not realized quite how much of reality he had saved Gaius from until then. The younger Illyrian began to gag in the background of the cell. Apparently he understood enough Cilician to get at least the drift of the description. Erzites laughed. Then he noticed that the agent was almost touching the bars. “Move back, damn you!” the guard ordered with a gesture of his club.

  Not quite close enough.

  “Calvus, can you make him come closer?” whispered the agent as he obeyed by a step.

  Sabellia had been hovering behind the centurion. She was waiting for the moment she would strip for the guard’s inspection. The grating was not wide enough for her to see past the torsos of the two men in front. Now Calvus eased the nervous Gaul aside. “Erzites,” the bald woman called over Sestius from her greater height, “that sounds marvelous. Do the women here make love to donkeys also?”

  Sestius looked back in shock. Perennius could imagine the slim-fingered hand gripping the centurion where Erzites could not see it. The soldier shifted out of the way.

  The guard also was surprised, in part by the grammatically-correct Cilician coming from a prisoner whom he had never before heard speak. Calvus smiled at him and continued, “I’ve always wanted real satisfaction, you know, Erzites.” She pressed close to the bars. “Tell me about the donkeys. Tell me about their—members.” Her hands touched the lower hem of her tunic. Instead of lifting it, as even Perennius expected at that point, Calvus tore the tough homespun as if it had been gauze. She extended the tear upward at a deliberate pace as she straightened. Sestius muttered something behind her. Erzites’ eyes were drawn, but it was under a frown of puzzlement. The guard was taken aback by more than Calvus’ hairless groin. “Quit that,” the villager muttered uneasily.

  “Do you ever let the jacks mount you, Erzites?” Calvus asked, spreading the halved garment away from her body. The tall woman was thin, even by male standards. There was nothing conventionally attractive about her form. Perennius beside her felt himself oddly moved. The effect on Erzites was quite different—but the agent was sure it was intended to be different, despite the woman’s phrasing. “I think that would be really satisfying,” Calvus said. “I’d die for that, you know, a member so long and thick.…”

  “Don’t talk about that, woman!” the guard shouted as he took a step backward. “A donkey on me? That’s—” He broke off because he could not think of an adequate word for the feeling which the concept engendered in him.

  Calvus pressed her groin forward against one of the vertical bars. She rubbed up and down it. Her torso was thrown backward to emphasize the obscenity of what she was doing. “You know what I mean by satisfying, don’t you, Erzites?” she said. Then she froze like a wax mannequin.

  “Quit that!” Erzites screamed. He lunged, ramming his cudgel at the narrow pelvis kissing the iron. The root-wood smacked, just as Perennius flipped his weighted cord around the guard’s neck.

  Erzites jerked back and swung at Perennius. The head of the club rang on the grating. If the guard had instead unwrapped the single coil from around his neck, he might have been free before Sestius clutched wildly and caught his right ankle. Erzites shouted again. Perennius yanked hard at the sash. Because the other end was not knotted, it slid loose when the guard bent toward the pull. Erzites’ club slammed down against Sestius’ gripping arm. The centurion yelped and lost the hold he had just taken.

  Calvus, recovering from the brutal blow, shot out a hand and caught Erzites’ club wrist. There was no fumbling to hold the big villager, only a straight pull that hauled his arm back through the grating like a gaffed trout. The iron boomed at the soggy impact. Erzites’ forehead hit a bar a millisecond after his shoulder made
the first contact. That fractional delay and the force absorbed by his torso saved the guard’s skull from crushing. He sagged unconscious. There was a line of blood across his forehead and cheek.

  “Get back!” Perennius ordered as Gaius and Sabellia tried to grab handfuls of the guard. The agent sprawled over Sestius. The centurion was moaning and clutching his bruised arm to his chest with the good hand. Perennius wrapped the sash around Erzites’ arm and one of the bars against which Calvus held it. Alone of the six people in the hut, the tall woman was not gasping for breath. The splotch of blood on her left hip was her own. The club had cut her flesh by smashing it against the wing of her pelvis.

  Perennius snugged the loop against the guard’s arm, then locked it with a square knot. The sash would not hold Erzites permanently, but neither would it have to. The agent straightened. “There, you bastard,” he gasped. “Try and get loose from that and I’ll break your arm besides.”

  Sabellia reached under the lowest crossbar and snaked the cudgel inside. She handed it silently to the agent. Then she cradled Sestius in her arms to help him slide back from the door where they were in the others’ way.

  Perennius was still breathing rapidly and through his mouth. He handed the knobbed, arm’s-length club to Calvus. “You all right?” he asked.

  “Here, let me try that,” Gaius said. He was puzzled that the agent had given the lever to the woman instead of using it himself. If the older Illyrian was injured or exhausted, then the younger man was more than willing to show his own mettle.

  Calvus and Perennius ignored him. Gaius’ attempt to push past the woman and take the cudgel failed unremarked. Calvus carefully set the knobbed end of the stick so that a vertical bar provided a fulcrum with which to pop one weld of a crossbar. “I’ll be all right,” the tall woman said. “I didn’t care for it, but it was necessary.” The agent could not be sure whether her answer was limited to the blow she had taken on the hip. As Calvus now knelt, the tear in her tunic had fallen closed again.

  Calvus began bearing down on the handle of the club. Perennius gripped the same crossbar and a vertical. The agent used all his strength in a vain attempt to push the one away from the other. It gave him something to do besides wait for the sound he expected, the splintering crash as the grating held and the wooden lever did not.

  The cudgel did not break. Instead it bent in a smooth, creaking arc until the tip which Calvus held touched the floor. The root-stock was tough and perfect for the purpose for which Erzites had chosen it. Its whippiness made it a more effective weapon. That meant also that the wood could not transmit the necessary force as a lever.

  “Blazing Hell!” the agent shouted. He released his own hold and dropped to the floor. His eyeballs had felt as if they were springing from their sockets with the effort.

  “Here, let me try,” Gaius suggested again.

  “Gaius, will you please wait for orders?” the agent growled up at him. It should have been obvious that the problem was in the tools rather than in the muscles behind them. Gaius was damned well old enough to avoid the childish need to be a part of every activity.

  “That was the weakest one,” Calvus said. “If it holds, the others will. Perhaps he—”she gestured toward Erzites with a flick of her chin—“has a knife or the like on him. If we could cut or even chip a weld, then perhaps the lever…?”

  “Right,” said the agent. It was a reasonable next step, now that their only real chance of escape had disappeared with the club’s flexing.

  The grating made it difficult to strip the guard on the other side of it. Calvus’ slim hands and arms had advantages over Perennius’ bunched muscles, but she herself was so awkward that the agent wound up doing most of the work himself. Erzites came around slowly. When they began to pull his tunics off, he struggled with increasing consciousness and vigor. There were seven of the garments. The outside one was foul. The innermost had decayed to stinking tatters that must have been close to the guard’s own adult years. By that point, Erzites was cursing loudly and trying to fight them with his free hand.

  Sabellia touched Calvus, then moved to the grating as the taller woman gave her room. The Gaul held another shard of the waste jar, a curving, hand’s-length fragment of the rim. It came to a point that was as blunt as a fingertip except for the slight knife-edge extension of the glaze. “Hey!” Erzites shouted. He jerked his head back as far as the bonds would let him. The shard plowed across his cheekbone to his right eye.

  “Move and it’s gone,” Sabellia said in a soft voice. The villager began to tremble. He squeezed the threatened eye shut. The other one stared out in terror. Perennius finished his task without obstruction.

  Sestius was recovered enough to go through the garments as they were passed into the cell. His forearm was badly bruised. It had not been caught between the club and the stone, and neither bone was broken. “Not a damned thing,” the centurion grumbled as he fingered the cloth. The light was too bad to search the tunics in any other fashion. “Lice. And if we could train up this stink, it ought to be able to cut iron. But nothing else.”

  “We need a knife, Erzites,” Perennius said in a friendly voice. “It’d be best for you now if we did get away, you know. We’ll let you go if we do, I promise that. But if we’re still locked in this cell when somebody else comes … well, I’ll use the time I’ve got. You’ll be dead before we are, I promise you. If it looks like I’ll have a while before they can really interfere … I know tricks that’ll make being buggered by a donkey sound like the most fun in the world, chappie.…”

  “Christ be my witness, there’s nothing!” the naked man whimpered. “The club and the food, the bed’s just a matteress on a stone ledge, that won’t help.… The others’d kill us if we brought anything else here to watch the meat. Look, I’ll go get a prybar, that’s what I’ll—” He stopped when the absurdity of what he was babbling penetrated even to him.

  There was a crunching sound. Calvus had set the edge of a piece of pot against one of the welds. The hard-fired stoneware had crumbled beneath her fingers as if it had been terra cotta. As expected, the iron was unmarked. “I wonder if we could use his teeth as a saw?” the tall woman said. “Of course, it would be a problem disarticulating his jaws with no tools, but if we could slice through at one hinge with a piece of the jar.…” No one could listen to Calvus’ matter of fact tone and doubt that she was absolutely serious in her suggestion.

  Sabellia had removed her claw of pottery when its threat had done the trick. Now Erzites bellowed again in terror and jerked repeatedly against his bonds. Perennius reached between the bars and caught the villager by the throat with one hand. It gave the agent a cold pleasure to squeeze in the knowledge that it was not his anger taking charge. The action was necessary to immobilize their prisoner so that he could not free himself in his struggles.… Erzites’ hairy face became flushed. His screams and the bestial rasp of his breathing whispered to a pause. In the wavering lamplight, the whites of the guard’s eyes began to turn up.

  Perennius took a deep breath himself. He released his prisoner. “When they come with the keys,” the agent said in a voice that was meant to be more calm than he could manage, “how many of them will there be?”

  “Christ save me,” Erzites wheezed. He had closed his eyes. Now he was massaging his throat with his free hand. His brief delay to recover ended even as the agent was reaching out again. “They’ll come a lot of them,” the villager said. He opened his eyes and jumped, but Perennius was relaxing. “They’re careful, Ramphion and the others. They know fighting men, and there won’t be less than a score of them with clubs to take you. They don’t want you dead, but they’ve strung up folk unconscious before to croak without coming around. ‘As the Lord wills,’ they say.”

  Perennius sighed. “All right,” he said matter of factly. “We’ll go with the teeth.”

  “Wait!” screamed Erzites. “My brother! He’s got a sword!”

  “Well, what good does that do,” asked Gaius as
the others paused. “He’s a mile away on look-out, right?”

  Panting, tumbling his words over one another, the villager explained, “He’ll be back at dawn. We trade, him and me, day and day when there’s meat on the wall and nobody else in the valley to watch. I forgot, Christ strike me dead, I forgot he’d be back, I swear it!”

  That was probably true, unlikely as it would have seemed to someone with less experience of interrogation under pressure than Perennius had. Even after your subject broke, you had no guarantee of the truth or completeness of what came babbling out. Erzites might well have been shocked into such a state that he forgot to volunteer a crucial detail. Certainly that was more probable than the notion that he had been deliberately concealing his brother’s imminent reappearance.

  “Well, I don’t see it makes any difference,” said Sestius reasonably. “Except we’ve got to work faster at cutting through the bars.”

  “No, no,” Erzites pleaded. “Listen, I’ll talk to Azon—he’ll cut you free with his sword, sure he will, Azon’ll do that for me, Christ save me! I’m his brother!”

  “Shit,” said the centurion, “he’d watch us pick you apart with tweezers, wouldn’t he? Before he’d risk pissing off Ramphion and his lot.”

  “You know, I think Erzites here will be able to convince his brother,” said the agent thoughtfully. “Of course, we can’t leave him naked and tied to the bars like this. Sure.”

  Behind Perennius, Sestius and Sabellia exchanged glances of disbelief. Even Gaius was surprised. Calvus and the villager could see the agent’s face. The woman’s thin lips formed themselves in an answering smile. Erzites, watching them both through the bars, began to tremble.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Erzites!” demanded the voice from outside. “Lend a hand.”

  Erzites stood in the middle of the outer room. He ground the butt of his club into his left palm silently.