Birds of Prey (24 page)

“If you want to eat real food and
fast,
you'll have me fix it for you,” the Gallic woman called. Both Anulf and the agent frowned in irritation. Sabellia was not speaking to them, however. The trio of foragers were looking approvingly at her. Sabellia lay on her back smiling. Her left leg was straight, her right knee cocked slightly. Perennius had been sure that the woman would draw both knees up to her chest and lie huddled on her side as soon as she was alert enough to feel German eyes on her. Obviously, Sabellia was already alert in ways that the agent did not wholly fathom.

Biarni, the pirates' cook, was a grizzled man who would have been short even without hunching over his withered hips. Perennius suspected the handicap was the result of an injury. A birth defect of that sort would have resulted in the infant being exposed on the kitchen midden for dogs to eat. Injured adults did not stand a great deal more of a chance among the free peoples of the North—the way the pirates had disposed of their wounded comrades, some of whom could have survived, was an example of that. But there were a few exceptions, like Biarni; and Biarni was no less jealous of his prerogatives for the fact that his fellows held him in obvious contempt.

Now the cook paused halfway to the cow. He was holding out the long knife with which he proposed to cut the beast's throat. “Hey!” he said angrily to the foragers. “I'm the cook here. Don't you listen to that—why,
I'll
shut the dog-turd up myself!” He stumped purposefully toward Sabellia with a wave of his knife.

One of the foraging Goths stuck the butt of his spear between the cook's crippled legs. Biarni flopped forward with a squawk. His knife flew out of his hand and bounced harmlessly from Anulf's trousered calf. Almost the whole band of pirates laughed at the cripple's discomfiture. The exception was Anulf. The chief kicked the fallen man furiously, shouting curses and following as his victim babbled and tried to roll away from the boots.

The Goth who had speared the heifer now slid the haft of an axe from his studded belt. The weapon was of moderate size, but it had double bitts and the look of hard use to it. The pirate sauntered over to Sabellia, raising his weapon casually.

Perennius tensed. He would have to use his left foot and kick over his injured right leg. If he could catch the Goth at the back of the knee, the man might fall backwards and—and get up to kill them all, but—

“All right, we'll see what kind of cook you make,” the Goth said. As the agent relaxed, the axe chopped the thong against the post to which it was anchored. The pirate pumped his axehead loose while Sabellia rolled off her buttocks to her feet. Her smile had changed to something very different when the Goth who freed her looked away.

“Frigg's balls, you scut!” Anulf roared as he saw what was happening behind him. “Who told you to let the bitch loose, Theudas?”

The other Goth had been wiping wood fibers from the nicks in the edge before he put his axe up. Now, gripping his weapon just below the head, he wheeled and demanded, “Who died and made you god, Anulf? I guess you'd let us all starve, wouldn't you?”

“Yeah,” snarled another of the men who had brought back the heifer. He strode toward the chief from the other side. “Just what
have
you done besides get most of us killed on this raid?”

Anulf's one-armed companion was reaching furtively for a spear at the moment tension broke. Biarni had gotten up when Anulf's attention turned from him. The cook, trying to creep away while he still watched his chief, had immediately fallen again into the coals of last night's fire. His squeals of pain and terror brought another surge of laughter from the remaining Germans. Their anger melted at the hilarious spectacle of a cripple dancing in a cloud of ashes.

“Here,” Sabellia said. She stepped to Theudas with her wrists, still bound, upraised. The Goth sawed through the knot with his axe. Theudas was nearly seven feet tall. He bent over Sabellia, concentrating on his awkward task like a tailor threading a fine needle. The picture of his care was frighteningly at variance with the agent's memory of the night before, the huge blond figure kneeling to rape the woman for the fifth time.

Anulf's companion tried to hand him the spear. The chieftain looked around to see why he was being prodded. The anger that had been directed first at the cook, then at Theudas, now flared up at the one-armed man. Anulf slapped the spear away with a curse. Then he aimed a kick which Grim dodged with the ease born of experience.

Sabellia was draping herself with a cloak of lustrous brown wool appropriated from another of the pirates. It hung down to her knees. The throat, meant for the neck of a big man, hung from her shoulders. She had pinned it up with the hems overlapping. Perennius noted that the woman, despite her present kittenishness, had not brushed at the grit and leaves clinging to her skin when she stood. “One of you take the loin out of that cow,” she called.

A pirate immediately roared, “Biarni! Get out and get busy or I'll kick your useless butt back to the Bosphorus!”

With most of the Gothic pirates following her, Sabellia stepped into the kitchen garden. “All right, pick some of that,” she began. “That's thyme and we'll need it. Now let's see, is there any mint?”

Perennius twisted around his fencepost to watch the woman and her entourage. He was certain that it was all a ruse. As soon as Sabellia got her hands on a knife, she would stab as many of the startled Goths as her fury could reach. The agent recognized the look he had seen in her eyes. Murder was a reasonable desire, but Sabellia would be cut down before she got more than one or two of her rapists. Worse, her action would eliminate any chance Perennius himself had of release.

Anulf was watching his men with a look as sour as the thoughts Perennius hid behind a bland expression. Calvus, smooth as an ivory finial, sat in her pose of rigid concentration. The agent could not imagine what the bound woman was trying to accomplish. He hoped that it might be an attempt to keep Sabellia from some suicidal gesture.

Though he knew it was dangerous, the agent said, “King Anulf, if you will release me, I can better discuss my Emperor's offer of gold to your Highness.” If Perennius's hands weren't free when the woman cut loose, all of them and the mission were well and truly screwed.

“Hel take you!” Anulf snarled. He stalked off to the ship and the wine still aboard it. Behind him skipped the one-armed man.

After that, the agent had nothing better to do than to watch Sabellia act.

Surely it was an act … but gods! it was a good one. And Perennius did not really know her that well, just assumed—
felt
—her similarity to another Gallic woman of years before.

Well, he hadn't known Julia that well either, as it turned out.

“Eggs!” Sabellia called, snapping a finger against her palm. “Come on, fellows, they kept chickens so there has to be eggs.”

“Hoy!” called a Goth. He lifted a largish brown egg from within a bush which he had parted.

“Right, look for nests,” the woman encouraged. “We need, oh, one apiece. You're a such big men.” Reaching under her cloak, flashing and then hiding her body in a fashion more enticing than her battered nudity of minutes before, Sabellia squeezed the biceps of the men to either side of her. One of them was the towering Theudas, the other his companion who had held a Herulian from behind for slaughter. “Now, where's the fennel? In all this garden, there must be some fennel.”

The entourage made an absurd progress of the whole garden. Burly pirates, the
Eagle
's murderous opponents less than a day before, paced beside the short woman. They held eggs, sprigs of herbs, and vegetables. Sestius was sunk in somnolent gloom. Gaius sat bolt upright. His face held a fixed expression while he tried to wear through his bonds by tiny movements against the rough surface of the post.

“Onions, now. No, those are leeks—well, bring them anyway, sure, but there ought to be—there, by the fence, that's right.”

Perennius had already determined to his satisfaction that he could lift his post out of the ground if he needed to. The sunken part had rotted enough to permit that. Once the post was out of the way, he could slip his bound wrists under his body. That would be more painful than he cared to think about, what with the spear hole in his thigh, but it was possible too. He did not waste effort on bonds that could not be abraded in useful time anyway. And he did not slip into the black despair that was always useless. Besides, she wasn't Perennius' woman, not this one, not even the other when it came down to cases.… Perennius watched, making the basic assumption that there was something to see besides a woman selling herself to the gang that had already raped her in concert for the right to pick and choose her partners the next time.

And even if it were that, sooner or later there would be an opening for Aulus Perennius to act.

“Ah, wild horseradish,” Sabellia said. She pointed toward a juniper outside the cleared area. In the juniper's shade grew a moderate-sized plant topped by a spray of hooded yellow flowers. “That one,” she directed, “the pretty yellow one. But only bring the root, it'll lie just beneath the surface.”

A Goth sprang to obey. He drew his dagger for a makeshift trowel.

“And now, boys…” the Gallic woman went on. She paused to squeeze again the arms of her nearest consorts, both of them laden with greens. “Now, the beef!”

The band roared with enthusiasm. It began to tramp toward the bloody carcass.

The agent had not been as hungry as the labor he had done since he last ate would have justified. That was due in part to the chill, first of the sea and then of the night on his damp body. Nausea from the rap on the head had contributed also. The pirates had really not cared whether the folk they dragged from the water lived or died. Perennius suspected that Calvus, still locked in his—her!—trance state had something to do with the fact that the others had not been clubbed as hard as was Perennius himself. They could not have been. At least one would have died of a crushed skull by now if they had all been treated as the agent was.

Sight of the dripping loin brought Perennius' appetite back with a rush, however, though his taste ran more to seafood than to beef when there was an option. Biarni had hacked the muscle out with unexpected skill. Cooking among the barbarians tended to be a process of boiling gobbets of flesh. The originals could be cows, pigs, sheep—or horses, if you happened to be with a raiding party on the eastern steppes. When haste required something different, like grilling, the results was apt to be the sort of disaster the pirates had faced—and had gorged on nevertheless—the night before. The crippled cook had shown despite that a familiarity with the heifer's anatomy. He had even gone beyond his instructions and had skewered the loin on an iron rod from the ship's furniture.

That initiative was a mistake, as Sabellia was quick to inform him. “No, no,” she cried, “we're not going to burn
this
like last night, are we boys?”

There was a chorus of cheers. One pirate aimed a kick at Biarni on general principles. “We need a platter. A big platter or a table.”

The platter that two Goths produced was obviously loot and not part of the normal shipboard gear. It was solid silver and over thirty inches in diameter. Sabellia directed it to the ground by pointing her finger. Then she had Biarni slap the meat onto it with a similarly imperious gesture. “Now,” she said to the assembled pirates, “who has a knife? A really
sharp
knife.”

Perennius shifted the post with his shoulder, then pulled it forward with his wrists. All eyes were on the woman. The agent thrust upward, wincing at the flexion of his wounded thigh. The post itself would make an adequate club in the chaos of bleeding men jumping away from—

Sabellia took the dagger the blond giant at her side was handing over. She smiled, knelt, and began chopping at the beef with quick, expert movements.

*   *   *

On the beached vessel, Anulf was rumbling drunken curses to himself below the level of the gunwale. Neither Sabellia nor the men around her paid any attention to the chief. Even Biarni seemed fascinated by the woman's skill with the knife. “Call this sharp?” she bantered, tossing the weapon back to its owner after a moment. “Come on,
really
sharp, I want to shave this, not gnaw it into hunks.” Someone else passed her a knife in replacement.

Other pirates began drawing the short blades most of them were wearing. They tested the edges. One enterprising fellow began to sharpen his knife, using a block from the farmhouse's limestone foundation as a whetstone. Soon the smoldering ruin was ringing with Goths scraping at stones with their blades. Some of them were so inexpert that they were dulling such edge as years of neglect had left.

The blond Goth took rejection of his own dagger in good part. As a joke he offered Sabellia the axe with which he had cut her loose. Both of them laughed. The woman reached up and squeezed the pirate's calf while she muttered a response too low for Perennius to catch. The agent had the post ready to be withdrawn, but there was no point in doing so at the moment. He could not imagine what Sabellia was about—if it were not what it appeared to be.

Whatever the truth might be, the Gallic woman was assuredly a cook as she claimed. She was mincing the loin as fine as the blades she was offered would permit—and some of them were sharp indeed. Even so, the edges dulled as she cut across the grain of muscle fibers, and she continually passed back knives to be resharpened. As Sabellia worked, she tossed occasional pinches of the chopped loin into her mouth. When Goths tried to steal bits as well, she rapped their knuckles with the flat or back of whichever blade she was using at the time. Only Theudas beside her was allowed a taste. She offered it to him to lick off the point of the double-edged dagger she held. Other pirates hooted in glee at the sight.