Anulf's attention returned from the interruption to his captives. Perennius was about to resume his spiel. As his mouth opened, Sabellia forestalled him by saying in Border German no worse than the agent's own, "Cut me loose for an hour and I'll fix you a meal as fine as the ones I prepared for the Emperor before he sent me as a gift to the Kings of the Goths."
The chieftain looked at her, then looked away without particular interest. The concept of women as human beings was as foreign to most Germans as it had been to Greeks in their Golden Age. "Gallienus could have waited," the Goth boasted to Perennius. "Anulf will come and see him in Rome one of these days."
"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, I 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."