Father Ramphion’s deep-sunk eyes glared at the agent. Villagers who had been chattering with joy now noticed the Illyrian’s struggle with himself. There was further commotion behind Perennius, toward the door of the church. He could not turn to see what it was. “I’m as much of a man as this bastard,” the agent whispered. He stared back at Ramphion while his right hand tried to find the dagger in his hem. There was no feeling in the agent’s fingers, in any of his limbs.
Sestius slid to the floor, Sabellia did not fall, but she
was obviously fighting as hard to stay upright as Perennius had fought to stand. Gaius flopped forward. He was trying to mouth the words of a song through lips too numb to have formed sounds. Perennius’ ears were buzzing. Over that empty burr came Calvus’ voice saying, “He has built up an immunity to the drug, Aulus. This must be part of a long practice for them. Let yourself go or they may – ”
Someone kicked Perennius’ feet sideways. The agent crashed to the floor. He did not feel the impact, though he could still see perfectly well. The two women toppled, Calvus by choice with the appearance of collapse, Sabellia when her stool was jerked away. Rough farmer’s hands gripped the table and the trestles supporting it, spilling Gaius beside his would-be protector in happy somnolence.
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 flat-footed on the ground, the agent thought. Perhaps they would break her shins before they tied her up. …