Maida said in a strained voice: “I—I can catch a word here and there. He’s —telling these other slaves how we were captured. It’s—Latin, of sorts.”
Bertha Ketterling squalled suddenly, in the absolute dark. “Somebody touched me!” she bawled. “A man!”
A voice spoke humorously, somewhere near. There was laughter. It was the howled laughter of animals. Slaves were animals, according to the Roman notion. A rustling noise, as if in the noisomefreedom of their barracks the utterly-brutalized slaves drew nearer to the newcomers. There could be sport with new-captured folk, not yet degraded to their final status.
Lucy Blair cried out in a stifled fashion. There was a sharp, incisive crack. Somebody fell. More laughter.
“I knocked him out!” snapped Minott. “Harris! Hunter! Feel around for something we can use as clubs! These slaves intend to haze us, and in their own den there’s no attempt to control them. Even if they kill us’ they’ll only be whipped for it. And the women will ....”
Something, snarling, leaped for him in the darkness. The authoritative tone of Minott’s voice was hateful. A yapping sound arose. Other figures closed in. Reduced to the status of animals, the slaves of the Romans behaved as beasts when locked in their monster kennel. The newcomers were hateful if only because they had been freemen, not slaves. The women were clean and they were frightened—and they were prey. Chains clanked ominously. Foul breaths tainted the air. The reek of utter depravity, of human beings brought lower than beasts, filled the air. It was utterly dark.
Bertha Ketterling began to blubber noisily. There was the sudden savage sound of a blow meeting flesh. Then pandemonium and battle, and the sudden terrified screams of Lucy Blair. The panting of men who fought. The sound of blows. A man howled. Another shrieked curses. A woman screamed shrilly.
Bang! Bang! Bang-bang! Shots outside, a veritable fusillade of them. Running feet. Shouts. The bars at the doorway fell. The great doors opened, and men stood in the opening with whips and torches, bellowing for the slaves to come out and attack something yet unknown. They were being called from their kennel like dogs. Four of the whip men came inside, flogging the slaves out, while the sound of shots continued. The slaves shrank away, or bounded howling for the open air. But there were three of them who would never shrink or cringe again.
Minott and Harris stood embattled in a corner of the slave shed. Lucy Blair, her hair disheveled, crouched behind Minott, who held a heavy beam in desperate readiness for further battle. Harris, likewise, held a clumsy club. With torchlight upon him, his air of savage defiance turned to one of quaint apology for the dead slave at his feet. And Hunter and two of the girls competed in stark panic for a position behind him. Maida Haynes, dead white, stood backed against a wall, a jagged fragment of gnawed bone held dagger wise.
The whips lashed out at them. Voices snarled at them. The whips again. Minott struck out furiously, a huge welt across his face.
And revolvers cracked at the great door. Blake stood there, a revolver in each hand, his eyes blazing. A torchbearer dropped, and the torches flared smokily in the foul mud of the flooring.
“All right,” said Blake fiercely. “Come on out!”
Hunter was the first to reach him, babbling and gasping. There was sheer uproar all about. A huge grain shed roared upward in flames. Figures rushed crazily all about it. From the flames came another explosion, then two, then three more.
“Horses over here by the stables,” said Blake, his face white aid very deadly indeed. “They haven’t unsaddled them. The stable slaves haven’t figured out the cinches yet. I put some revolver bullets in the straw when I set fire to that grain shed. They’re going off from time to time.”
A figure with whip and dagger raced around an outbuilding and confronted them. Blake shot him down.
Minott said hoarsely: “Give me a revolver, Blake! I want to ....”
“Horses first!” snapped Blake.
They raced into a courtyard. Two shots. The slaves fled, howling. Out of the courtyard, bent low in the saddle. They swept close to the villa itself. On a little raised terrace before it, a stout man in an only slightly modified toga raged. A slave groveled before him. He kicked the abject figure and strode out, shouting commands in, a voice that cracked with fury. The horses loomed up and he shook his fists at the riders, purple with wrath, incapable of fear because of his beastly rage.
Blake shot him dead, swung off his horse, and stripped the toga from him. He flung it to Maida.
“Take this!” he said savagely. “I could kill ....”
There was now no question of his leadership. He led the retreat from the villa. The eight horses headed north again, straight for the luridly flaming forest.
They stopped once more. Behind them, another building of the estate had caught from the first. Sheer confusion ruled. The slaughter of the master disrupted all organization. The roof of the slave barracks caught: screams and howls of pure panic reached even the fugitives. Then there were racing, maddened figures rushing here and there in the glare of the fires. Suddenly there was fighting. A howling ululation arose.
Minott worked savagely, stripping clothing from the bodies slain in that incredible, unrecorded conflict of Confederate soldiers and Roman troops, in some unguessable pathway of space and time. Blake watched behind, but he curtly commanded the salvaging of rifles and ammunition from them dead Confederates—if they were Confederates.
And as Hunter, still gasping hysterically, took the load of yet unfamiliar weapons upon his horse, the eight felt a certain incredible, intolerable vertigo and nausea. The burning forest ahead vanished from their sight. Instead, there was darkness. A noisome smell came down wind; dampness and strange, overpowering perfumes of strange, colored flowers. Something huge and deadly bellowed in the space before them which smelled like a monstrous swamp.
The liner City of Baltimore plowed through the open sea in the first pale light of dawn. The skipper, up on the bridge, wore a worried frown. The radio operator came up. He carried a sheaf of radiogram forms. His eyes were blurry with loss of sleep.
“Maybe it was me, sir,” he reported heavily. “I felt awful funny for a while last night, and then all night long I couldn’t raise a station. I checked everything and couldn’t find anything wrong. But just now I felt awful sick and funny for a minute, and when I come out of it the air was full of code. Here’s some of it. I don’t understand how I could have been sick so I couldn’t hear code, sir, but ....”
The skipper said abruptly: “I had that sick feeling, too—dizzy. So did the man at the wheel. So did everybody. Give me the messages.”
His eyes ran swiftly over the yellow forms.
“News flash: Half of London disappeared at 2:00 a.m. this morning .... S.S. Manzanillo reporting. Sea serpent which attacked this ship during the night and seized four sailors returned and was rammed five minutes ago. It seems to be dying. Our bow badly smashed. Two forward compartments flooded… . Warning to all mariners. Pack ice seen floating fifty miles off New York harbor… . News flash: Madrid, Spain, has undergone inexplicable change. All buildings formerly known now unrecognizable from the air. Air fields have vanished. Mosques seem to have taken the place of churches and cathedrals. A flag bearing the crescent floats… . European population of Calcutta seems to have been massacred. S.S. Carib reports harbor empty, all signs of European domination vanished, and hostile mobs lining shore…
The skipper of the City of Baltimore passed his hand over his forehead. He looked uneasily at the radio operator. “Sparks,” he said gently, “you’d better go see the ship’s doctor. Here! I’ll detail a man to go with you.”