It was during a pause that they realized, more or less together, that the squealing sound was not the breath in their lungs or an artifact of fatigue in their ears. Someone was stroking a ship closer. There was even an undercurrent of voices chanting as they kept the long sweeps creaking forward in unison.
“Herakles!” said Sestius in the tone of a man who watched an apotheosis. He tried to lift his torso onto the grating, but his arms would not support his weight. “Somebody’s found us.”
“It’s a boat?” Gaius wheezed from behind the centurion.
“Wait, dammit, keep your voices down,” Perennius insisted. For the first moment, he was speaking only from instincts of secretiveness burned into him during circumstances in which every human was an enemy. When his mind cleared enough for thought, however, his reaction was the same. He tilted his head, and tried to drain water out of his left ear canal by stretching it with a fingertip. That did not help clarity enough. “Calvus,” he called over the waves’ mild slapping, “can you tell who it is?”
“They’re speaking German, Aulus Perennius,” the traveller replied. “I think it may be – ”
“Help us!” cried Gaius over the sound of oarlocks. “Help us for god’s sake!”
The agent’s first motion was toward his side and the sword he was not wearing there. “Gaius!” he snarled across the bundled clothes. “Shut up or – ”
“Aulus, we’re going to drown!” the younger man screamed. Everyone has his own fear. . . . “Help us! Help us!”
Perennius’ mind had already planned the killing. He would go under the float, not over it. He would seize Gaius by the knees, jerk his head under water, and shift his grip to the younger man’s throat to strangle him. But as the agent’s hands poised to drive him under the narrow grating, his intellect reasserted itself over the murderous reflexes which had been his life for so many years. He relaxed. The tempo of the sweeps had already slowed. Moments later the squealing stopped entirely. It was replaced by a louder rumble of voices which Perennius himself could now tell were speaking German.
Blazes.
“All right,” the agent said, loudly but in Latin. “Calvus is an envoy to Odenath, Bella’s his wife, the rest of us are high staff officers accompanying him. We’re worth money! And blazes! let me do the talking – understand?” As he
spoke, Perennius was grubbing through folds of wet garments to reach the pouch containing the bullets he had not fired during the battle. He had forgotten to take the pouch off when he jumped into the sea, a lapse he would have called self-destructive madness if someone else had done the same thing. Now the agent opened the flap and spilled the leaden missiles out into the sea.
He hoped the sling itself would pass in the darkness and confusion. At any rate, he was not ready to abandon it just yet. But high, ransom-worthy Roman officers were not likely to be found carrying pouches of sling bullets.
The sweeps were creaking again, noticeably closer. Soon the castaways would be able to see their rescuers cresting a swell.
If they were the people Perennius suspected they were, they would have a very clear memory of bullets from his sling.
The ship, a darkness of sharp lines against the blur of the elements, loomed over the grating to starboard. It was almost close enough for Perennius to reach out and touch the nearest oar.
“Christ protect us!” said Sabellia in a voice that held little hope of that protection. “They’re the ones we set afire and got away from.”
And who else would have come upon us in these waters, thought the agent. He cried in German, “Wotan has blessed you, glorious warriors! Your arms will drip with gold from our ransom!”
It might have worked. Perennius was still not surprised that the pirates clubbed him unconscious as they dragged him over the gunwale of their ship.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“You hit this one too hard,” a voice was saying. The words buzzed and threw purple after-images across the surface of Perennius’ mind.
“No, he’s not dead,” another voice replied. They were both speaking in German, but the dialect differed from that which Perennius had learned in his youth. The vowels were shorter and flatter than those of the South Rhineland. “Besides, what does it matter? We should have thrown them all back into the sea. Except for the women.”