Raptor (26 page)

It was just a moment’s work for me to breach the wall and shoulder my way inside, dragging Becga behind me. But he, or some part of his garments, caught on some projection of the wood there. We were momentarily halted and, despite the noise out front, the Hun woman heard us behind her. She turned, dropping the hide flap and opening her mouth. Too far from her to use my sword, I gasped, “Sláit!” and my juika-bloth leapt from me toward the woman.

The bird was doubtless as surprised and confounded as she was, for I had never before commanded it to “kill!” another human being—except Brother Peter, and that time I had made certain that Peter seemed to the eagle to be something other than a human being. So now, though the juika-bloth obediently flew straight at the Hun female, it made no attempt to drive beak or talons into her. Still, its fluttering full in her face made the woman dodge violently and neglect to scream for help, at least long enough for me to get entirely inside the hut, and for me to lunge and swing my sword and cut the woman’s throat. A scream did come out of her, but an almost soundless scream, a gush and spray of blood from the severed vessels and windpipe of her neck.

Meanwhile, the captive woman and boy had awakened, and were whimpering as they struggled out of the stinking furs in which they were wrapped. No doubt they, now finding new and mud-faced persons looming over them, were more terrified than they already had been. I quickly knelt beside the woman and clapped a hand over her mouth. Becga, imitating me, did the same with the boy.

“Clarissima Placidia, we are friends, come to help,” I whispered to her, as she clawed futilely at my muffling hand with what remained of both of her own. “Do not make a sound. If there is to be any rescue, you must do just as I say. Tell that to your son as well.”

My speaking in Latin must have given her confidence in us. She nodded and I removed my hand, and she told young Calidius to follow our instructions. Shed of the furs, the lady Placidia was clad only in a sheer, almost transparent undershirt, bulged out by her grossly swollen abdomen and its protruding knob of navel. Her long hair was a mare’s nest of tangles and snarls, and her face was haggard, but her eyes still showed some spirit. I turned to her son, and in the dim light from the brazier he
could
have passed for Becga, or vice versa. He was of exactly the same height and slightness, and he was fair of hair and complexion, and he was dressed in much the same sort of fine garments that the charismatic wore under his heavy woods clothing.

“Becga, take off your cloak and boots,” I said to him, and to the woman: “Lady Placidia, help your son get quickly into them.”

That occasioned quite a flurry of activity among us, because, while the exchange was being made, I was also—with water from the jar in the hut—washing off Becga’s face mud and smearing what I could of it onto the face of young Calidius.

“Now, my lady—” I began, but was interrupted. The tumult of noise outside had been still going on, but it suddenly got louder and different.

Now, to the crackle of brush fire and the hubbub of shouts and curses was added the muted rumble of hoofs. I went to the door, stepping over the dead Hun—where my juika-bloth was calmly making a meal at the gaping neck wound—moved the hide flap just a little aside and peeked out. All of the Huns’ scruffy horses were loose in the clearing. Obviously Wyrd had cut their picket line and driven them in among the huts and tents and campfires. Now, confused by their freedom, frightened by the still-blazing brush roof, the glary-eyed animals were milling about, running hither and yon, dodging the frantic grabs of their likewise milling masters.

“More distraction. Good,” I murmured, then bent and picked up one of the blanket furs. Using it to protect my hands, I lifted the hot clay dish of coals and held it against the underside of the hut’s roof, where the dry brush immediately began to burn. “Lady Placidia, as soon as this roof is well aflame, I want you to clasp your son to your side—not your son, but this substitute child—and together run out into the clearing, as if you are fleeing the blaze.”

“But—” she said, then stopped, for she had fully comprehended our plan on the instant. She shut her eyes and swallowed once or twice, and I could see a tremor go all down her nearly nude body. But then she opened her eyes, looked at me squarely and bravely and said, “Take good care of Calidius.”

“I will, my lady. Go now,” I said, for the roof was already burning so fiercely that we were all crouching away from the heat.

She paused only long enough to hug her son and kiss him, then put an arm around the charismatic—then paused again, and bent to kiss
him
—before she and he leapt over the dead Hun woman guardian and burst out through the door flap. Because the hide went on flapping several times afterward, I could see that one of the Hun men out there had presence of mind enough to leave off chasing the horses, and to seize both Placidia and Becga, and to hold them tight.

I called softly, “Juika-bloth,” and the bird came not too reluctantly away from its feeding, for now sparks and embers were falling from the roof. I took Calidius’s hand and led him out through the gap I had torn in the rear wall. As might have been expected, there were no Huns going back and forth behind that hut on routine errands. But the dawn was now far enough along—and the whole dale so brightly lighted, besides, by the two flaming roofs—that I feared we would be sighted if we tried to climb the hillside. So, holding the boy close, I slipped behind a thick tree’s trunk, where I could peek around it and watch what happened in the clearing, while we waited for Wyrd to come and tell us what to do next.

Some of the Huns had caught some of the horses, some were still chasing other horses that continued to elude them, some were busily carrying out various contents of the first hut that had caught fire, and the one Hun was still holding Placidia and Becga in grim embrace. I was afraid that soon the Huns would think to come and look inside the newly burning hut, to see why the captives’ guardian had not also fled the fire. But that did not happen. Something else did, and something that was not in Wyrd’s plan.

The turmoil in the clearing suddenly became chaos. Those Huns holding horses let go of them, and men and horses were all again running wildly about, for yet another horse had galloped into the encampment. There was a man astride it and he was violently, efficiently swinging a battle-ax. He had already cut down two Huns before I realized that the attacker was not Wyrd.

It was Optio Fabius, of course, but he was not riding the bay horse on which he had left Basilea. He was riding my black Velox, no doubt because Velox’s saddle was backed with a pillow seat, and on that Fabius no doubt hoped that his wife and son would soon be riding. It was a vain hope, and he had been foolish to follow us. Had Wyrd not already disposed of the guards beyond the camp perimeter, the optio would have been dead before he got anywhere near here. And now, despite Wyrd’s prepared distractions, despite Fabius’s own advantage of surprise assault, the odds were simply too much against him.

Impatient, impetuous and foolish he certainly was, but valiant he most certainly was, too. His galloping about the clearing took him several times out of my sight, but he hacked down at least two more Huns that I could see, before something occurred to check his furiously swinging ax arm. The Hun who was holding the two captives threw Becga to the ground, and planted a foot on him, to free an arm to draw his sword, and that blade he laid across Placidia’s throat, while he yanked back on her hair to raise her head. Where they stood, they were well illuminated by the blaze of the hut I had set afire, so Fabius saw them. When he did, he reined Velox so abruptly to a halt that the horse reared. What the optio might have done next will never be known. For, in that moment when he was off balance, unable to swing his ax or otherwise defend himself, the surrounding Huns leapt upon him. They did not use their own weapons, but merely by weight of numbers dragged Fabius off his saddle and down to the ground, and let Velox trot away unscathed.

When Fabius was down, and struggling under a heap of the savages, the Hun holding Placidia removed his sword from across the woman’s throat, but only to allow for a good swing backward. Then, still clutching her hair, he shoved her body away from him, and slashed with the sword as hard as he might have hewn at a tree, and cut her head cleanly off her neck. It must have been the female half of my nature that made me instantly and instinctively cover little Calidius’s eyes. And I kept my hand over them during the subsequent occurrences.

The head dangling by its hair from the Hun’s fist drizzled only a little blood and other substances from its stump, and its eyes blinked only a few times before ceasing, half-lidded. But the body lying supine on the ground spouted a good deal of blood from its neck stalk, and its arms and legs convulsed so that the light shift it wore got rucked up to expose all its nether parts. They were exposed not just to the degenerate Huns, but also to Fabius. He was by now pinned prone on the ground, two or three Huns holding each of his extremities, but another holding his head so that he had to regard what had been his wife. Then another Hun did something even more outrageous. He tore at the optio’s lower garments, and ripped them away, so that
his
bottom also was exposed. Next, that Hun hiked up his own ragged tunic to reveal that his male organ was erect, and he flung himself down upon the helpless Fabius to rape him intra rectum.

However, Fabius was not yet entirely helpless. He was unable to break free of his captors, but he could writhe and twist enough to prevent the rapist’s penetration. At last, frustrated, the Hun stood up again, snarled “Vakh!” and spoke some words of apparent instruction to his fellows. They, holding tight and tugging at Fabius’s hands and feet, turned him over onto his back, and one of their number in charge of his head turned it again so he had to regard his wife’s dead body. This time, when he did, such an expression of horror came over the optio’s face that I looked away from his predicament to see what he saw.

The Hun who had slain Placidia was now striding away, with Becga like a sack of meal under one arm. He had dropped Placidia’s head so that it lay also seeming to regard her body with its half-opened eyes. The body had ceased convulsing, and now its limbs only twitched, as do those of a horse flicking off flies. But its legs twitched themselves apart, and farther apart, and farther apart. And the swollen abdomen above slowly collapsed, with little heavings and ripplings, like a blown-up bladder that had been pricked with a splinter. And out from between the twitching legs there gushed a quantity of fluids of various viscosities, and then there slowly, very slowly extruded a slimy, shapeless mass of something pulpy, colored dark red and bluish purple. When it was entirely out on the ground, the mass briefly throbbed and gave a wail—only a short, thin sound, but audible where I was—and then lay still and shiny and silent.

Its wail was echoed by Fabius with an agonized scream. I do not know whether he screamed at what he had just seen or at what was being done to him. The lecherous Hun so eager to violate him now took out a blade—no sword, just a belt knife—and carefully, almost delicately made a short incision in the optio’s belly skin, just above the crotch hair. Then the Hun tucked his knife away, lowered himself onto Fabius’s pinned-down body, thrust his fascinum into that slit and began pumping away as he would have done with a woman. Fabius did not scream again, and he did not even struggle any more, but only hopelessly stared, with eyes that had gone quite mad, at the remnants of his wife and second child.

Then I nearly gave a squeal myself, when again a hand fell upon my shoulder from behind. But it was Wyrd, looking very tired and rather melancholy, as he gazed upon the scene before us.

“Pluto would come up from hell to see such things,” he murmured, then beckoned for me and Calidius to follow him.

He led us, all of us loping along in a crouch, around the outer edge of the clearing to where he had two horses tethered to a tree. One was my Velox, the other was one of the Huns’ shaggy Zhmud horses, wearing a saddle and bridle even more decrepit than itself.

“We must steal quietly away,” Wyrd whispered to me. “But once out of their hearing, we can break into a gallop and, I think, get clean away. The Huns will be so happily entertaining themselves with Fabius that it ought to be a good while before they even begin to wonder how their guards let him through.”

He hoisted the little boy up onto Velox’s saddle, telling him, “You have been a very good and brave Roman, so far, Calidius. Just continue to do so, and to remain silent, and we will soon have you home.”

“And my mother and father?” asked the boy, frowning in puzzled recollection of what he had seen before I covered his eyes. “Will they be coming, too?”

“Soon or later, boy, everyone gets home. Now hush, and enjoy the ride.”

Wyrd and I leading the horses at a quick but quiet pace, we headed due west. At first I thought we were taking a circuitous route to confuse the eventual pursuers, but we kept on going west, and finally I asked Wyrd why we were not returning to the barges. “Because they will not still be there,” he growled. “Or at least we cannot trust that they are, without Fabius holding the bargemen at sword’s point. So we are going to the broad, slow and shallower north-flowing stretch of the Rhenus, where we and the horses can swim across. If we can make it to the western bank before the Huns catch up to us, they will not dare follow us into garrison territory.”

After a moment, I said, “Fabius was foolish. But he was gallant.”

“Ja,” Wyrd sighed. “I was not too much surprised at his arrival. And I could only hope that you had effected the substitution of sons before Fabius came to disarrange our plans. By Wotan the Goer, but you did well, urchin.”

“The lady Placidia was also gallant, or I could not have done it. And Fabius, what will become of him?”

“The Huns will go on doing what you saw—taking turns—until they tire of him, or until he is about to bleed to death. Then, while he is yet alive and conscious, they will give Fabius to their women.”