Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  “Erzites!” called the voice again. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Answer him!” hissed Perennius, giving a twitch to the rope of sashes knotted around the villager’s throat. The agent did not hold the free end. Calvus had that duty. Any time the slim woman chose, she could break Erzites’ neck with a single jerk on the tether.

  “F-fuck off!” Erzites shouted back. “You’re late!”

  “Fuck yourself!” replied his brother angrily. “I had to gather the fucking eggs so we’d have something to eat, didn’t I?” The hut darkened as Azon’s big form, a near twin of his brother’s, filled the doorway. He bent and entered. Father Ramphion or an earlier leader had decided that a gap of an hour or so in the manning of the look-out point was less dangerous than the chance of unattended prisoners somehow escaping in a similar period. Having tested the physical wards, Perennius was inclined to disagree; but the dearth of traffic past the valley really mooted the point anyway.

  “Say,” Azon went on, “I could hear ’em really going to it at the church. They’ll be up for more meat any time, I’ll bet you.”

  His brother hit him alongside the head with the cudgel.

  It was a nervously clumsy blow. The shaft instead of the knobbed end of the weapon struck Azon. He was too thick-boned a man to be laid out completely that way. Even so, Azon fell to his knees. He flung out his arms toward his brother in a gesture compounded of defense and supplication. Erzites grabbed him by the hair, screaming, and began to batter at him repeatedly with the club. The two men were locked so closely now that the weapon could not be used effectively. Erzites was mad with fear. He would not back off a step to finish the job properly.

  The tip of Azon’s sword, thrust sheathless under his belt, clanged on the floor when he fell. Azon made no attempt to draw the weapon against his brother’s unexpected attack. His hands clutched wildly. Erzites’ tunic, knotted over the shoulder where it had been torn for removal, now tore again. Suddenly tangled in his own garment, Erzites paused and cursed. His brother broke free.

  The left side of Azon’s head was a mass of blood. A chance poke from the butt of the cudgel had closed his left eye forever. Panic blinded the right eye also and the mind behind it. The big villager bolted forward and slammed into the door of the cell. He bit at the bars with the fury of a wolf in a trap. Sestius lunged forward in an attempt to grapple with him. The centurion jostled Perennius but did not prevent the agent from getting his own iron grip on Azon’s throat.

  Erzites wheeled. His tunic pooled at his ankles. He gripped his club with both hands, as if it were a threshing flail. It hissed through the air as the guard swung with all his strength. Azon’s head deformed. The grating rang from the impact of the skull being driven into it. Erzites struck again. The body was jerking in Perennius’ grip, but that was only the dying response of its autonomic nervous system. The cudgel made a liquid sound when its knob struck the second time. Matter splashed the metal and Perennius’ forearm. The agent released Azon.

  The third time, the club struck the door a foot above the slumping corpse and flew out of Erzites’ grasp. The killer also collapsed on the floor, wheezing. In the last instants of the fight, the brothers had been almost equally mindless.

  Perennius dragged the corpse closer by its belt. He reached across to draw the sword. It was a standard government-pattern short sword. Its blade was dull and very badly maintained. The hilt was of bronze in a fish-scale pattern which might once have been gilded. Chances were that the weapon had belonged to Azon and Erzites’ father when he served with the imperial forces. The valley must have gathered a considerable armory in its decades of murdering travellers. The brothers’ own lack of equipment underscored their separation from all communal aspects of village life. There was no need for it to be otherwise, of course.

  Perennius gave the sword to Calvus, though the three other of his fellow prisoners were babbling and jostling forward. Erzites was still in a state of collapse. The agent tied off the villager’s tether. The villager had just proven he was willing to do anything to save his skin. Perennius saw no point in risking the fellow’s escape.

  Calvus put the point of the sword at the joint between a vertical and a crossbar. She held the weapon almost point down. Perennius started to apologize for the fact that the sword was so dull and that the point had been rounded by improper sharpening. The tall woman rapped the oval pommel sharply with the heel of her right hand. Metal rang. The crossbar jumped as the sword inserted itself where the weld had been.

  “Herakles!” Sestius blurted. Sabellia had more experience or at least more awareness of the other woman’s capacities. The Gaul fell silent and drew the centurion back to give Calvus more room to work.

  Perennius stopped himself with his mouth open. He had been about to say that if Azon had been correct, the five of them might be only minutes short of being trapped by villagers returning for a new victim. There was no reason to say what they all knew; and it was hard to imagine anyone working faster or more efficiently than Calvus, anyway.

  The blade was of good steel. Its dull edge should have been a handicap. If so, the bare-handed blows with which Calvus struck the pommel were more than hard enough to overcome the defect in materials. The bald woman placed the point carefully, rapped the hilt, and shifted the sword to the next joint while it was still singing with the parting sound of the weld it had just cut. When Calvus reached the end, the crossbar dropped to the floor with a clank.

  “Wait,” said the agent as Calvus raised her sword to the next higher of the five crossbars. The agent set the freed bar into the grate much as they had attempted earlier with the wooden cudgel. In the outer room, Erzites was watching them. He was fingering his throat where the rope had rubbed it. He was not attempting to break free.

  Perennius braced his left leg on the stone doorjamb and gripped the lever with both hands. Nothing moved. The agent’s closed eyes sizzled with sheets of violet and magenta. He began to breathe out. The framework and his lever were rigid, and his muscles bunched like the surface of a sheet of water-glass. “By god!” Perennius shouted. Two welds popped like hearts breaking. Calvus slammed her sword through the third and top-most. The vertical bar banged away. With that and the one crossbar gone, there was now a gap through which even Sestius, the bulkiest of the prisoners, could squeeze.

  The agent had fallen when the bars gave. Now, panting heavily, he allowed Gaius to help him to his feet again. Perennius felt a mingled pride and embarrassment. He knew that Calvus could have made a surer job of it if he had asked her to. But Perennius had succeeded … and it had been important to burn away in action some of the emotions raised by the bloody fight he had just finished.

  Sabellia crawled through the opening without being told. Military discipline held back the other men until Perennius said, “Right, but don’t go out of this hut.” He nodded Calvus through with a rueful smile. She most of all of them must have recognized his doubtful judgment in using the prybar himself. Well, she’d seen him use worse judgment too, in that alley in Rome. Perennius was damned if he knew why she trusted him.…

  The others were peering through the doorway. They made room for the agent when he joined them. Perennius lay flat and scanned as wide an arc as he could without actually sticking his head outside. The situation was about as he had expected. They were in one of the huts, differing in no external respect from the others to either side of it. Perennius had not checked the hinges on the iron door, but he suspected that they could be unpinned and the door removed at need. Even a careful search of the village would display nothing more than that the locals were Christians … illegal but common, and of no particular concern outside cities where they came into violent conflict with other communities.

  From the circular tower of the church came the faint sound of singing. The door might open at any moment to a procession that would soon become the head of a hunting party.

  Erzites screamed. The sound was so unexpected that Perennius dodged sideways before he
even looked to check the cause. As he did so, Sestius struck the villager a second time with the sword.

  “Hell and Darkness!” the agent shouted. He leaped up, grappling the centurion from behind and immobilizing the bloody sword. He was too late. Azon’s weapon had done its work. Erzites still whimpered and clutched his neck, but there was no disguising the arterial pulses from between his fingers. Perennius shook the bigger man in fury until the sword dropped. “I told him he could live if he helped us!” the agent said as he pushed Sestius away.

  “I didn’t tell him that,” Sestius said. His eyes were on the floor. He was rubbing his wrists.

  Perennius swore again and returned to the door. He did not care about Erzites, whose bare heels were now thumping the floor. He cared very much for the principle of keeping faith with agents, however. It always mattered, because you always knew you had played false before; and in the uniquely personal relationship of intelligence principal and agent, more passed between the two than either intended.

  So be it. There was other work waiting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Perennius pointed. He crooked his elbow to keep his hand inside the hut. “Calvus,” he said, “do you see the wagon they were loading with hay down there? The half-full one.”

  “Yes, Aulus Perennius,” the woman agreed. It was an ordinary, rugged farm cart with two wheels and a shaft to which a pair of donkeys could be harnessed. A saw-bladed hay knife projected from the stack from which the cart was being filled. The load was presumably intended to feed the draft animals in the stone corral. Work had been broken off when the strangers were announced.

  “Can you move it to the church?” the agent asked. The haystack and the building were a quarter mile apart. There was no direct road, and the ground was only nominally level.

  “Yes,” said Calvus. The simplicity of her answer was disquieting, because it seemed inhuman. It was also the only thing simple about Calvus.…

  “The hut our gear was stored in should be the third one over,” Perennius continued. He gestured with his left thumb. “The rest of you go, take weapons—not armor—and some gold. Run for it till you get to the head of the valley. Don’t take animals, that’ll cause a stir and they’ll slow you down. By the time you get there, you ought to know if it’s safe to come back and load up properly. If it isn’t, get to the nearest post and report this … hive. You’re on your own from there.”

  “I’m coming with—” Gaius began.

  Perennius jumped to his feet. “You’re doing as I damned well say, boy!” he shouted. He shook his fist in the younger man’s face. The anger Perennius had banked at Erzites’ murder now blazed again from his eyes. “Now, hop!”

  The fit passed as if it had never occurred, as so many outbursts had passed in previous years. Some day … Perennius handed to Calvus the bar he had used for a lever. He took Azon’s sword himself. It was blunt but still bloodily serviceable. Sabellia looked at the agent, then darted through the doorway with the two soldiers behind her.

  “Well, noble lady,” Perennius said to his companion. “We’re either going to create a diversion or do something that should have been done thirty-odd years ago. Let’s see which.” He paused to take along the oil lamp, still burning, before he led Calvus outside.

  The two of them had not quite reached the haycart when Sabellia and the soldiers exited the storage hut. The two men carried spears and belted swords. Sabellia presumably had retrieved the long knife she had brought in preference to weapons whose size made them awkward in her hands. Perennius had half-expected at least one of the men to carry a packload of loot—which would not even make a good monument for them if the pursuit caught up. The woman waved. When Gaius paused behind her, she caught his hand and tugged him back toward the shortest line to the valley’s head. The spike outcropping, now vacant, was their towering endpost.

  Calvus looked over the cart, then gripped the shaft to lift it. “Wait,” the agent said. The hay had an Autumn smell, an undertone called a “green odor” though it was a part of vegetation whether green or a year chopped, the way this hay was. Perennius held the lamp flame under the edge of the hay piled against the rear stakes of the cart. Only when the hay was burning with a popping, smoky flame did the agent dump the slight remnant of olive oil onto the cart. “Let’s go,” he said, bracing himself against the side of the cart. “We need to jam this into the door of the church.”

  As at other times, Calvus’ initial clumsiness was almost a match for her strength. She more or less got the hang of pulling the cart after the second time she overbalanced. Both times the cart rocked onto the back of its bed with a crash and a shower of sparks. After a point, the center of gravity shifted when the pole went up. Holding the cart became a matter of weight rather than strength. Calvus could lift the cart level again from behind, despite the flames, but when she raised the pole too high from the front, she could not keep the load from flopping all the way over till it grounded.

  Sparks flew harmlessly into the green wheat. They lodged in Perennius’ hair and tunic, snapped at his palms like mice when he crushed them out. The smells of hair and of wool burning were similar and similarly nauseating. Perennius had blisters on the back of his neck where the skin had no protection but the sweat that streaked from his scalp in quick runnels. The load of hay was burning faster than he had expected. It had been densely compressed by a year in the stack, but the process of chopping and loading it on the cart had loosened the mass a great deal. Still, it was necessary to have a very good fire going before they reached their goal. They had that. The unconquered Sun could see!

  The smoke, the crackling of the flames, and the way the cart jolted the agent’s shoulder in bouncing over the uneven soil were all parts of the same blurred continuum. It ended when Perennius’ downcast eyes saw the cartwheel bump onto the surface of the roadway proper. He looked up. They were twenty feet from the door of the church. The stone cylinders mounted up higher than he could see for the haze of smoke above him.

  “We’ve got to turn it and back it to the door,” the agent called. He thought Calvus could not have heard over the crackling of the fire which now involved the whole rear of the cart. Perennius stepped away from the side-stake he had been pushing against. The heat, more than a discomfort now, was driving him off anyway. Before he could touch Calvus’ arm and repeat his command, the woman had slowed and begun to swing the shaft to reverse the vehicle.

  “Blazes, be careful,” the agent muttered in unconscious humor. He gripped the shaft also, ready to throw his weight across it if it started to lift. “This goes over and we won’t tilt it back from behind.” Sparks and the bitter, cutting smoke enveloped them as the pair thrust the cart backwards at increasing speed.

  The squeal of the church door opening inward was even louder than the shouts which immediately followed.

  “Now!” roared Perennius, a prayer in the form of an expressed hope. The cart smashed to a halt. It was caught by the stone doorjambs on either side. The blazing load shifted, caught its breath, and spewed up with redoubled fury.

  “Get ready for them,” the agent said to Calvus. He drew the dull, bloody sword from the hay where he had thrust it. “They’ll use benches to shove it back, and you’ve got to hold.”

  From the cries within, some of the villagers had been burned when the vehicle jarred to a halt and the hay continued to slide. Perennius dropped to his hands and knees to peer under the tilting bottom of the cart. Orange fire swished and bloomed in the doorway. Villagers had begun to rake it back into the interior and out of their immediate way. Something heavy thumped against the framework of the cart. Calvus held her grip on the shaft without twitching a muscle of her limbs or her thin, still face.

  There was a tattoo of orders from within. They were loud enough for Perennius to hear them over the roar, but the words were not intelligible. The agent was still bent over in a salamandrine crouch. A makeshift ram beat the flames and slammed into the cart. Charred wood collapsed. Perennius saw le
gs that capered in sparks and smoke while the owner screamed. Calvus held, the beginnings of a smile on her face. The assault dissolved and the legs disappeared again behind the bright-shot haze.

  The hay and the cart itself were licking the stone with an orange tongue. At the edges, soot smeared the fresh-hewn yellow rock. At the center, in a scar tapering upward, the fire was hot enough to burn the stone on the outermost level of the church into quicklime. It was white but dreadful with the reflection. The tongue left whorls of soot across the face of the next cylinder also.

  A man started to crawl under the cart. He held a spear and muffled his face with a cloak. Perennius heard singing behind the attacker. The villager was blinded by the cloth that kept the fire from his skin. Perhaps it protected him from what he knew he would see waiting. Perennius reached in and thrust at where he thought the villager’s neck would be. The agent would have cut instead, but the wheel blocked a sidearm swing and the cart itself prevented a vertical chop. The sword’s mutilated point met bone. Perennius shouted and threw his shoulder against the pommel. He remembered the way the blade had chiseled its way through iron with Calvus’ strength behind it. The sword grated a hand’s breadth inward.

  Above the agent and his victim, the cart shuddered to another attempt to ram it out of the way. The vehicle rocked inches forward, toward Calvus. Then the woman slammed it back against the church harder than it had struck the first time. The axle broke. The left wheel spun lazily outward. The whole cart lurched toward Perennius. The agent rolled backwards in a cloud of sparks belched from the shifting hay. His sword was still gripped firmly by the villager’s body, as firmly as that body was held by the weight of the cart above it. An arrow snapped from one of the slits. It missed by a hand’s breadth the agent who until then had been in the dead zone hidden by the cart. The barbed point pinned his tunic to the hard soil.

  The section of roof over the doorway collapsed into the interior of the church.