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beating in my head like a drum. I knelt there gasping for breath until the pain receded.
    When I was ready to go on, Drusilla helped me to my feet and we continued.
    The cliffside rippled with many eroded ravines and shallow furrows filled with brush and small shrubs. Although these little valleys were steep, I thought we might at least have branches and suchlike to hold on to as we climbed. We made our way to the nearest defile. “I’ll go first,” I said. “Follow me, and do what I do.”
    On elbows and knees I pulled myself up, grasping stones and sticks and clumps of sea grass, wriggling like an eel through the undergrowth. It might have worked, too; we might have succeeded but for the dogs.
    We had just begun our ascent when there came a shout from the beach, and then I heard barking. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw two huge brown hounds bounding toward us, growling as they came. Behind them ran three raiders carrying spears; two others stood on the strand watching.
    The dogs were on us in an instant. Drusilla screamed. One of the beasts snatched at my leg as I kicked out. It seized me by the cloth of my trousers and began pulling. I slid down the defile and lay curled on the broken slate with my arms before my face to protect my head and throat until the handlers came and pulled the hounds away.
    No doubt they would have punished us more severely for trying to escape, but their hands were full—what with the dogs and spears—so they cuffed me halfheartedly about the shoulders a few times and hauled us back to the beach where, with a whack on the arm with the butt of a spear, they shoved me back down on the sand. Drusilla began sobbing again, and my head pounded with such ferocity I could not see. I lay on my back with my eyes squeezed shut, moaning, bereft in my misery.
    In a little while the sun rose full and with it the tide. When I stirred myself again, I saw there were more raiders on the beach now—fifty, maybe sixty or more—standing in a clump, many leaning on their spears in postures of fatigue. They seemed to be waiting for something…. With this thought I turned my eyes to the sea as the first sails came into view: three brown-and-red squares billowing in the light morning breeze, gliding around the far headland and into the bay. These were soon joined by five more, and then seven.
    Fifteen ships! Even if most were not fully manned, it still meant five or six hundred warriors. I reckoned that Guentonia boasted but two centuries, Lycanum only one, and Bannavem none at all—fewer than three hundred soldiers for the defense of three towns. While it is true that a trained legionary is worth five or more barbarians, even legionaries cannot be three places at once. Bannavem was lost before the battle ever began, just as Darius had said.
    The first of the ships came close to shore, and one bedraggled knot of captives after another was led out into the surf: men, women, and children—whole families ripped from their beds in the dead of night and marched to the coast. I looked for any familiar faces among the first unhappy passengers but saw no one I knew.
    And then it was my turn. Two raiders came, and without a word I was pulled to my feet and dragged out to a nearby ship. The cold waves washed around my legs, and then I was roughly hauled over the side like a fish. Drusilla tumbled in after me, and we huddled together in the bottom of the boat. When the shallow hold was full, the warriors turned the ship and pushed it out into the bay. I heard the hull grind against the sand and hoped for a moment that we would be grounded and unable to sail. Then a wave lifted the ship, the sail puffed out, and we slid away.
    I pulled myself up the side and looked out over the rail at the slowly receding coast. Black plumes of smoke rising into the clear morning sky marked the ruins of Bannavem;around the countryside smaller gray-white columns indicated other burning