The smoke, the crackling of the flames, and the way the cart jolted the agent's shoulder in bouncing over the uneven soil were all parts of the same blurred continuum. It ended when Perennius' downcast eyes saw the cartwheel bump onto the surface of the roadway proper. He looked up. They were twenty feet from the door of the church. The stone cylinders mounted up higher than he could see for the haze of smoke above him.
"We've got to turn it and back it to the door," the agent called. He thought Calvus could not have heard over the crackling of the fire which now involved the whole rear of the cart. Perennius stepped away from the side-stake he had been pushing against. The heat, more than a discomfort now, was driving him off anyway. Before he could touch Calvus' arm and repeat his command, the woman had slowed and begun to swing the shaft to reverse the vehicle.
"Blazes, be careful," the agent muttered in unconscious humor. He gripped the shaft also, ready to throw his weight across it if it started to lift. "This goes over and we won't tilt it back from behind." Sparks and the bitter, cutting smoke enveloped them as the pair thrust the cart backwards at increasing speed.
The squeal of the church door opening inward was even louder than the shouts which immediately followed.
"Now!" roared Perennius, a prayer in the form of an expressed hope. The cart smashed to a halt. It was caught by the stone doorjambs on either side. The blazing load shifted, caught its breath, and spewed up with redoubled fury.
"Get ready for them," the agent said to Calvus. He drew the dull, bloody sword from the hay where he had thrust it. "They'll use benches to shove it back, and you've got to hold."
From the cries within, some of the villagers had been burned when the vehicle jarred to a halt and the hay continued to slide. Perennius dropped to his hands and knees to peer under the tilting bottom of the cart. Orange fire swished and bloomed in the doorway. Villagers had begun to rake it back into the interior and out of their immediate way. Something heavy thumped against the framework of the cart. Calvus held her grip on the shaft without twitching a muscle of her limbs or her thin, still face.
There was a tattoo of orders from within. They were loud enough for Perennius to hear them over the roar, but the words were not intelligible. The agent was still bent over in a salamandrine crouch. A makeshift ram beat the flames and slammed into the cart. Charred wood collapsed. Perennius saw legs that capered in sparks and smoke while the owner screamed. Calvus held, the beginnings of a smile on her face. The assault dissolved and the legs disappeared again behind the bright-shot haze.
The hay and the cart itself were licking the stone with an orange tongue. At the edges, soot smeared the fresh-hewn yellow rock. At the center, in a scar tapering upward, the fire was hot enough to burn the stone on the outermost level of the church into quicklime. It was white but dreadful with the reflection. The tongue left whorls of soot across the face of the next cylinder also.
A man started to crawl under the cart. He held a spear and muffled his face with a cloak. Perennius heard singing behind the attacker. The villager was blinded by the cloth that kept the fire from his skin. Perhaps it protected him from what he knew he would see waiting. Perennius reached in and thrust at where he thought the villager's neck would be. The agent would have cut instead, but the wheel blocked a sidearm swing and the cart itself prevented a vertical chop. The sword's mutilated point met bone. Perennius shouted and threw his shoulder against the pommel. He remembered the way the blade had chiseled its way through iron with Calvus' strength behind it. The sword grated a hand's breadth inward.
Above the agent and his victim, the cart shuddered to another attempt to ram it out of the way. The vehicle rocked inches forward, toward Calvus. Then the woman slammed it back against the church harder than it had struck the first time. The axle broke. The left wheel spun lazily outward. The whole cart lurched toward Perennius. The agent rolled backwards in a cloud of sparks belched from the shifting hay. His sword was still gripped firmly by the villager's body, as firmly as that body was held by the weight of the cart above it. An arrow snapped from one of the slits. It missed by a hand's breadth the agent who until then had been in the dead zone hidden by the cart. The barbed point pinned his tunic to the hard soil. '
The section of roof over the doorway collapsed into the interior of the church.
Gasping, Perennius worked the arrow out of the ground without haste. He knew there would be no more shooting. Edges of flame were cutting from the nearer arrow slits. They left their own stains of soot and caustic across the face of the church. Thatch and wooden beams roared inside, shaking the stones as hymns had never done.
"We'd best move away, Aulus Perennius," Calvus shouted over the voice of the fire.
The agent looked up at her. She extended a hand to lift him from his splay-legged seat on the ground. Perennius stared past the woman to the church. The outer cylinder had begun to act as a chimney, drawing air through the slits and the part-blocked door to feed the Hell within.
Everything must be ablaze by now. Not only roof members but clothing and furniture, paint from the walls and gases driven from corpses that were being reduced to calcined ash. There could be no screaming now, not that voices could have been heard over the roar.
"Right," Perennius said. He accepted the offered hand and rose slowly. As they walked away from the funnel of fire, he said, "I wonder if they drained the bath. I'd really like to get clean."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
"All right, let's see your papers," demanded the commander of the detachment at the west gate of Tarsus. "Dis-mount, dammit."
"Hey, you're not checking them," said Gaius. He waved toward the stream of traffic into the city.
Sestius was already off his donkey. He grimaced, only partly at his stiffness from the ride. It was for Perennius to say, "Gaius, let me handle this." He walked over to the officer. The agent's hand was in his purse.
The ride on a donkey's narrow back had left Sestius with a limp. Perennius could imagine what similar punishment would have done to him. Instead of riding, the agent had walked, leading his donkey. The miles had left his wound afire, but they had also worked his thigh to suppleness again. It had been a punishing two days, but now the agent did not limp. Under other circumstances, he might have ridden anyway so as not to delay his companions. Because of Calvus, that question had not arisen.
Gaius rode splendidly and loved it. His only objection was that a donkey was not a fit mount for a cavalry decurion. Donkeys were what was available in the valley they had depopulated, however. The small-holdings they passed later had nothing better, so Gaius had made do. Sabellia, like Perennius himself when the agent was healthy, had no great affection for riding, but she did it adequately when the need arose. Sestius was scarcely adequate - he had fallen several times and under unexpected circumstances - but he was too much a soldier to put any weight on his own feet that could go on others'.
Calvus had been awkward the first few days on shipboard. Mounted, she was a disaster. When she made an effort to cling to the donkey with her knees, the animal stumbled and fell from the crushing grip. When Calvus attempted to mitigate that vise, she inevitably fell off. There could be no question of the traveller's strength, but she did not have the instinctive control needed for some very ordinary tasks until she had practiced them for days.