"Thou here?" said Wardo. "Well, I am sorry."
Nicanor looked up. His face, white with more than its prison pallor, was drawn as though by bodily pain.
"Ay," he said dully, "I am here."
"I would thou wert not," Wardo muttered. "Come, then."
"I have a friend here, whom I would take with me," Nicanor said, without rising. "Stand still, and I will call him."
He whistled softly through his teeth, a gentle hissing, until a shadow seemed to stir from the far corner of the cell where the torchlight did not fall. Forth into the light hobbled a great gray rat, gaunt, and scarred, and lame. At sight of Wardo it whisked back into the gloom; again Nicanor whistled; again it appeared, and again vanished. A third time, emboldened, it essayed, and came to Nicanor warily, dazed in the unwonted light. Nicanor threw a bit of cloth torn from his tunic over its head, fastening it so that the beast could neither bite nor see, tied its forelegs together, and without more ado thrust it inside his tunic. Wardo gaped.
"Well, of all playmates! Will he not scratch thee?"
"Not while the cloth is about his head," Nicanor answered. There came an odd note of pride into his voice. "Momus and I are old friends. I maimed him; he hath bitten me. Now we understand each other. I have taught him to fight,—he is quite as intelligent as Hito,—and there is not a rat in the dungeons that can beat him. Man, you should see him fight!"
"I'd like to!" quoth Wardo, promptly. "Maybe, at Cunetio or Corinium we shall find some trainer to try a main with thee. Now come; we have tarried long enough."
In the slaves' court Hito was fuming over the departure of his deputy and the half dozen prisoners. As Wardo and Nicanor approached he leered upon them balefully.