There were sounds besides the men speaking nearby. There was an indistinct murmur, more voices at greater distance . . . the crackle of a fire . . . occasional clapping and hoots of triumph.
There were also moans.
The agent’s hands and arms were tied to a post behind his back. He opened his eyes a slit to watch through the hedge of lashes. The ship the Eagle had fought clear of that afternoon was now hauled up on a narrow beach. The cookfire close by laid gleams and shadows across the sun-bleached oak of the ship’s planking. The hull was clinker built. Each row of planks overlapped the row beneath it instead of butting smoothly edge to edge as was the normal method here in the South. It gave the pirate vessel a ridged, implacable appearance like that of a crocodile digesting a child on a mud bank.
Across the fire from their ship, most of the pirates were gang-raping two women. The nearer of the victims was Sabellia.
“Well, go ahead and cut his throat, then, Grim,” the first voice was saying. “Biarni! Isn’t that meat cooked yet?”
Perennius opened his eyes and raised his head to the post from which he had been sagging. He gave what was meant to be a smile of greeting. The agent’s legs sprawled out in front of him. He had to remember to kick with the left one, though the numbness in the right was less than he would have – “Warriors!” he said aloud in his Schwabian dialect. “Our ransom will make all of you ring-givers! And I will sacrifice to my own gods in thanks at being overcome by heroes so great!”
“He’s awake, Anulf,” said the owner of the second voice. He looked uncertainly toward the other Goth who stood beside the bound agent.
Perennius was tied to one of the posts of what had been a fenced garden. The pirates had slashed gaps in the wattle fencing to use the posts for immobilizing their prisoners. Gaius was struggling with his bonds eight feet to the agent’s left, and the huddled figure at the post beyond the courier was presumably Sestius. The farmhouse itself still burned sluggishly in the background. It must have been quite a display when its thatch blazed up. A moment’s thought would have given the pirates the building for shelter; but they obviously spent few enough moments on thought.
Vicious little children, and nothing but a tottering Empire to keep the world from becoming their world.
Grim, the Goth who had drawn a single-edged knife to finish the agent, had no left arm below the elbow. He wore a green tunic with embroidered sleeves. The tunic was of good quality, but that was no indicator of rank among pirates who had had the opportunity to pick their choice of looted clothing. The obvious leader of the band was the man the other had called Anulf, a great, brown-bearded hulk of a fellow with a livid bruise on his forehead.
Perennius thought he recognized Anulf from the instant before their ships collided. The Gothic chieftain had been in the front rank then, wearing a gilded helmet crested
with the image of a long-tusked boar. The pirate had gone down with a crash as an oar blade ended his fight before it began. He was not wearing the helmet now, nor the leather cuirass faced with large bronze disks which the agent remembered also from the battle. Anulf did carry his long sword, however, slung across his back from a baldric. The birds-head pommel waved over his shoulder like one of the Wotan’s ravens.
Now Anulf looked at Perennius with the interest a shopper gives a carcass in the poulterer’s shop: checking the hind feet to be sure of buying rabbit and not cat. “You’re the leader of this lot?” the German asked. “The woman said you are.”
“The woman?” Perennius repeated. Sabellia had broken? Of all of them, the agent would have guessed she would hold out the longest. . . .
But as Perennius turned his head to the right, a swarthy Herulian rose to his feet crying, “Five!” The German still wore a tunic of iron-buckled deerskin. It flapped back down over his thighs as he stood up. Two friends pounded his back in triumph. One of them was jiggling ale or looted wine from the jeweled cup he offered.