“Hey, shut the fuck up!” Respa shouted. He threw a shoulder blade at the agent. The heavy bone bounced off the post as Perennius jerked his head aside. The missile left behind the smell of cooked flesh and a bubble of laughter from the Goths seated for toasts and boasting.
Calvus’ advice, to wait and attract as little attention as possible, was good. Perennius had a great deal of experience in waiting. Let them get drunk or whatever the traveller had in mind. The agent quietly flexed his muscles against each other or against the post. His wounded thigh was far less knotted by the trauma than it should have been. He wondered if that had something to do with the tingling Calvus’ fingers had left behind as they bandaged the wound.
Perennius kept his own smile inside. He had experience in doing that, also. When he let his emotions show on his face while he prepared, people shied away as if they had seen a shark grinning.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Three hours later, the pirates were slurping the last of their wine. A Goth named Veduc was describing, victim by victim, the seventy Romans he had slain the day before. It was the sort of performance that followed each victory; and a night’s drunken stupor had turned the disaster of the previous day into the triumph of the present. Veduc swept his arms outward and fell on his back with a crash. The shield with which he had been gesturing clipped Grim. The one-armed man leaped up, cursing and dabbing at his bloody ear. Veduc began to mumble and raise his legs as if he were trying to walk forward, straight up the sky.
There was laughter, but not the raucous gales that the drunkenness should have heightened. Several of the Goths seemed to have slumped on their sides. Perennius’ eyes narrowed. Respa, the veteran who had first hailed Theudas, now leaned forward. He started to crawl toward the center of the circle on all fours. Respa kept scrabbling at the ground, turning over and over a pebble as he shuffled through the midst of his fellows.
“Whoo, Respa’s past it!” crowed a black-haired Goth wearing a Roman helmet. The speaker’s face changed abruptly. He doubled up and began to vomit. His hands pressed to his belly. In between the wracking tremors, he gave squeals of animal pain.
There were more men suddenly on their feet or trying to get there. Hulking pirates swayed, looking around in horror as if the landscape were a sea of flames around them. One of them dabbed at his face with both hands. At first he patted gently. After a moment he began giving himself brutal slaps that stained his moustache with his own blood. “It’s not there!” he cried. His voice was slurred. “I can’t feel my face and I can’t feel my hands!” He began to cry. Again and again he squeezed his palms to his cheeks as his hands slipped away.
Theudas rose. The man standing beside him whimpered and laid a hand on the chieftain’s shoulder. “Storar?” Theudas said, looking at the pirate who had grabbed at him. Storar screamed and clutched himself as if he were trying to hold in his slashed bowels. His sphincter muscles opened. A gush of half-digested waste poured down his pants legs. The stink of it had enough impact, even among the surrounding horror, that Theudas backed away with his nose wrinkling.
The circle of boasting, drinking heroes had scattered like a straw fence in a windstorm. Nearby, oblivious to them as they were to him, Biarni was clutching the cooking tripod to keep himself upright. Biarni’s eyes were glazed. The iron leg must have been very hot, but the cook showed no sign of feeling the damage. One of his palms slipped. His twisted body fell in a cloud of ash that mounted on the column of hot air. The pot and tripod overset, clanging. Boiling water sloshed on the coarse soil. It did not touch the flames that Biarni’s struggles were stirring in the heart of the fire.
That, Perennius thought, was the measure of the disaster which had struck the pirates. A cripple was being burned alive, and not one of the Germans around him was laughing.