“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 mattress 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!”