The remains of three sailors lay amidships, sprawled over the upright grain jars. The ten-gallon containers were made as cheaply as possible, meant to be opened after their single use by having their necks struck off. Blood had soaked deeply into their unglazed surfaces, giving accents of darker color to the pinkish clay. One of the men looked completely uninjured, even peaceful. The body had stiffened, but when Lycon lifted it to search for a wound, the sailor’s back and thighs showed only the usual post mortem extravasation.
“His ear,” called Vonones unexpectedly from the slip where he stood. “The right ear. Those long claws. . . .”
Impassively Lycon shifted the body back. There was a trail of blackened blood from the ear canal, matting the hair on the sailor’s temple. “It must see better in the dark,” Lycon said, as he laid the corpse onto the jars again. “Better than they did, certainly. It must have taken part of them at a time, caught its breath, and—got some more.”
He walked toward the stern, stepping again from the stoppered jars to the gunwale. The barge shifted a little under his weight, first fetched up by the stern line, and then quivering against the slip under the sluggish impetus of the Tiber’s current. Lycon did not notice the motion in his preoccupied state. He had crossed gorges bridged by vines, more concerned for the load of brilliant, valuable birds he carried than he was for his own safety. After all, the real danger in this situation waited on the levee in a guarded palanquin.
The melange in the stern-hollow looked even more like meat for the stewpot than that in the bow had done. One of the things ripped during the night had been a skin of wine. Its contents had thinned and kept liquid the blood that pooled beneath the corpses.
“You!” Lycon called as he squinted down at the carnage. The stern wales were curved upward sharply. The hunter touched the steering oar with his left hand to steady himself. “Teamster! Come over here and tell me all you know about this.”
Vonones gripped the teamster foreman by the elbow and thrust him toward Lycon. “Go on,” he urged ungently. “Do you want to get us all crucified?”
“I called to Ursus,” the foreman said, as if only by talking could he bring himself to step closer to the barge again. “I said, ‘Give us another squeeze of wine,’ you know, because we were out and I figured they had some aboard. And he didn’t answer, so I got pissed off. I mean, he was senior man, but he could still be out stumbling along with the torch if I said so, Dis take him.”
Lycon and Vonones were watching the foreman carefully. He kept his eyes fixed on the sternpost, as if oblivious both of his audience and of the present condition of the barge. “So I let the stern come abreast of me,” the teamster continued, “and I shouted again. And I should’ve been able to see him at the tiller—there wasn’t any moon what with the clouds, but still against the water beyond—and he wasn’t there at the oar. Nobody was. And just then the barge ground hard against the bank—hard—and so I go and jump aboard . . .”
“Which one of these is Ursus?” Lycon interrupted. He gestured toward the heaped bodies.
The foreman did not lower his eyes. “He was about my height,” he said to the sternpost. “He never wore sandals, in the boat, said he couldn’t get a grip with . . .”
“Look at them, damn you, and tell me which one is the helmsman!” Lycon shouted.
“He had a beard!” the teamster shouted back. Tears were dripping from the man’s eyes, and the veins on his neck stood out. “He wore a beard because of the scars on his chin from when a cable parted and slapped him when he was a lad!”
Lycon stepped into the barge, ignoring the sound his boots made. He began picking through the tumbled corpses. He’d seen worse. He’d done worse—across the Rhine, driving a village of Boii in panic through the woods at dawn. He didn’t have enough troops to have surrounded the Germans or even to have beaten them had they stood and fought. But he could frighten them like deer into a pit trap, a covered trench filled with sharpened stakes, because the cohort commander wanted to show results without risking too many men in hostile territory.