Birds of Prey (10 page)

The reception room in which they waited was dingy. It seemed to be used to store old Customs records, judging from the seals on the dusty document cases stacked along one wall. The naval contingent at Ostia was under the Naval Prefect at Misenum, one hundred miles south on the Bay of Naples. The vessels here were attached to the Customs Service, and their command staff was housed in a corner of the Customs Station. Ill-housed, not surprisingly, and furnished with cast-offs from their senior partner.

Calvus looked around the room. Monochrome stucco was flaking from the walls which were not covered by boxes, and some of the marble bits of the mosaic flooring had worked loose from their concrete bed. “I mention this because it may be necessary for you to know it, Aulus Perennius,” the tall man said. “I can sometimes influence persons to fall in with a course of action. Especially when the emotional temperature is low, or when the other person is very excited and considering the desired course of action himself. The course I desire.”

It did not occur to Perennius to doubt what the other man was saying. The agent's skin flashed cold and his right hand curved over the grip of the sword he had been issued only hours before. “Now, tell me what that had to do with me being here,” the agent said softly.

The hands that had lifted Perennius without effort remained crossed in Calvus' lap. His eyes were alert but fearless as they met the agent's. “That ability had nothing to do with you,” the tall man said simply. “I don't want—could not use—anyone who needed prodding to act. I told you, Aulus Perennius: I was not raised to handle weapons.” Calvus grin was brief and unreal. “My weapons have to handle themselves.”

Shoes slapping down the hall and a burst of voices discussing insect netting drew the attention of the waiting men to the doorway. A plump man in his mid-twenties stepped into the reception room, calling one last objection over his shoulder to someone unseen. The newcomer had a curly beard, well-trimmed, and wore a tunic with the two thin stripes of equestrian rank. He nodded to Calvus and Perennius before seating himself on the wood-framed couch facing them. A layer of dust lifted from the couch pad, provoking first a curse, then a sneeze. When he had recovered himself, he said, “All right, gentlemen, Terentius Niger at your service. Nine chances in ten, what you need isn't in my department. This is the
Naval
contingent, not Customs. If you're the lucky tenth, I probably can't do a thing for you either—you know that those bastards won't issue gauze curtains for my office?
You
try and work there some night when you can't read a document for the gnats in your eyes!”

“I'm Aulus Perennius from Imperial Affairs,” the agent said, watching the young tribune stiffen. The agent saw no reason to hide his identity or that of his office. “I realize you won't have received the orders yet, but it would help us a great deal if you could tell us what major naval units are available here—and of course at Portus.” The administrative offices had remained at Ostia when Portus, the artificial harbor for heavier vessels, was constructed adjacent to Ostia some two centuries before. Perennius had learned not to be over-specific when trying to learn something from a bureaucrat.

“Major naval units available,” Niger repeated. He grinned bitterly. The tribune was young enough to hope that by being frank, he might be able to get word back up the line to where it might help correct the situation which he deplored. “How about jack shit?” he said bluntly. He leaned forward in his couch. “You know how quick Rome'll start to starve if the grain supply from Africa is cut off? Weeks if we're lucky! And
that's
if nothing happens to the warehouses here.” He waved his hand in a dramatic, ring-glittering circuit in the air. “The only things to stop pirates from sailing right into the harbor and burning it down around our
ears
are the gods, may they continue to preserve us, and my twelve customs scows. There's half a dozen light galleys laid up in Portus, but they haven't been in the water since Commodus died—and I couldn't crew them anyway.” Niger grimaced and added, “Besides which, my Marine contingent just got drafted into a Field Force legion. Now you two tell me—is that a safe state for the capital of the Empire?”

Hell, no; but it's the state that everything else's in, Perennius thought. Aloud he said, “I'd like to take a look at those galleys you mentioned. I'm sure something could be arranged about crews … and we wouldn't need all of the ships, of course.”

Niger stood up. “You think I'm joking?” he asked. “They haven't touched keel to water in seventy years—and Neptune alone knows when the damned things were built! But come along, you can see for yourself.” He stepped to the doorway by which he had entered. “Rufio!” he called. “Rufio!”

The attendant who had greeted Perennius initially appeared in the hallway. “Sir?” he said.

“I'm taking these gentlemen to Shed Twelve,” the tribune explained. “They want to see what passes for naval power in this wretched excuse for an age.”

As Perennius and Calvus followed him to the stand of government litters and bearers, the agent thought of how many times he had performed this basic task: checking garrisons, fortifications, or supply dumps so that Rome could better estimate the war-making capacity of an enemy. Normally, however, the agent would have been equipped with a packet of documents—forged, of course, but convincing even to a skeptic. It did not strike Perennius as particularly humorous that he was being shown Rome's own defenses without any of the preliminaries he would have thought necessary as a spy.

*   *   *

“Well, here they are,” Niger said. His voice whispered back and forth between the brick walls and high roof timbers of the dry dock. “Go on, tell me it's not as bad as you expected.”

The shed was a single building with six separate roof peaks. The troughs were supported by columns rather than by walls. From where the three men stood on the raised entrance platform, they could see all six of the docked galleys. The murky water of the harbor lapped just beyond the open front of the building, but the hulls were on dry ground. Timber baulks held each upright.

Niger had opened the shed door using a key with two large prongs to turn the wards. Now he stepped to the nearest of the stored vessels and pressed the prongs against the railing without result. Patiently, he tried a few feet further, then further yet. On the third attempt, the iron prongs sank in as easily as if they had encountered a cheese. “There,” said the tribune in gloomy satisfaction, “dry rot. What did I tell you?”

The rear platform of the shed was nearly of a height with the galley's stern rail. The bowsprit and stern posts of the vessels curved up sharply above either end. The poop itself was raised a full deck above the planking that covered the waist of the ships. Perennius stepped aboard the nearest ship. His hob-nails echoed like rats scurrying along the roof of the shed. Though one whole side of the building was open, its interior was hot and dry and smelled of pine tar.

“All right, these look like what we need,” the agent said. He swung himself down to the main deck with a thump, disregarding the ladder pegged to the bulkhead. “What sort of complement do they carry?”

The agent began to walk toward the bow. The hull, shrunken by years in storage, quivered enough in the baulks to give itself a queasy sort of liveliness. Two long ventilator slots before and abaft the mast step ran most of the length of the deck. The ventilator gratings had been removed and were leaning against their low coaming, giving Perennius a view of the interior as his eyes adapted. In the ovals of gray light through the oar locks, he could see four axial columns of benches. The outboard pair, nearer the hull strakes, were low and barely wide enough for one man and the oar he had to swing. The interior benches were separated by a storage well three feet wide which ran the length of the lower deck, directly above the keel.

“For oarsmen, thirty-six men on the lower bank, seventy-two on the upper,” Niger said. There was a slight pique in his tone at the agent's refusal to be horrified at the ship's condition. Perennius had seen border posts whose garrisons were equipped primarily with the farm implements they needed to raise their own supplies. The tribune might think that dry-rotted hulls were a disgrace, but that was because of his youth and the parochialism of a central-government official. “You can use fewer oarsmen, of course, the ship just doesn't move as fast. If you depend on what
I've
got available, you use a
lot
fewer oarsmen.”

“It's a bireme, then?” the agent asked. The main deck was almost flush with the hull. It was capped with a coaming a hand's breadth high rather than a railing or bulkhead. Outboard of and a step down from the deck proper was a covered outrigger whose frame supported a bank of oars. In a battle the catwalk would permit a rank of Marines to fight with locked shields while archers on the main deck fired over their heads.

“If you want to be technical, it's a liburnian and a sort of trireme,” Niger said, “but I never noticed that putting a name to something made it sail faster. Or found a crew for it. You need a couple dozen seamen, too, you know, unless you expect to row all the way—which you can't. And I told you what happened to my Marines, didn't I?”

An animal miasma still drifted up from the rowing chamber, despite its decades of standing empty. Normally the oarsmen would have voided their wastes over the side, like the Marines and the deck crew. That would not have been possible while the vessel was under oars, however. Beyond that was the effluvium of over a hundred men straining in the rowing chamber while the sun baked the deck above them and glanced from the oar-foamed surface of the water. The whole blended in an amalgam sweeter than the vegetable odors of the ship herself, and as permanent as the pine timbers which it had impregnated.

“She'd carry fifty soldiers comfortably?” Perennius estimated aloud. He had reached the bow and was peering over it, past the upcurved bowsprit.

“Eighty on war service,” Niger called, “if she didn't break up under their weight as she probably would now. You see the bronze sheathing's gone from the ram, the gods know how long ago. Stolen or turned to coinage, it doesn't matter. Ram anything with the hull this rotten and the bronze'd be the only thing that didn't powder.”

Perennius turned and looked back the way he had come. Calvus stood just inside the open street door, spare and silent. Distance and the lighting hid the stranger's face, but Perennius had enough experience now to imagine its expression of preternatural calm. A damned strange man, but at least Calvus did not complicate with instructions the task he had set for the agent.

The tribune was poised on the platform with one hand on the stern rail. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, but he had not quite decided to jump onto the deck as the agent had done. Not a bad kid. Like Gaius, one of those there would have been some hope for, if there were any hope for the Empire they served. “All right,” Perennius said. He began to stride back along the hundred feet of deck separating him from the other men. “How long would it take you to put one of these in shape for a long voyage? If you had the men and stores turned over to you, whatever you said you needed and could be found in the port.”

For the space of six measured strides, the only sound in the drydock was that of the agent's boots on the planking. When Niger spoke, it was with caution and none of the bitter wise-cracking of his earlier remarks. “Not less than three days,” he said. “Maybe as much as seven. She'll have to be caulked and repitched.… For that matter, we'll have to survey all six and see which is most likely to hold the water out. Mast and spar, fighting towers, oars…”

The tribune's musing aloud paused when Perennius fell below his line of sight past the poop deck. When the agent had climbed the ladder, their eyes met again. Niger looked troubled. “I'd appreciate it if you'd start the list of men and materials required,” Perennius said to the younger man. “Figure out where you could get them if you had a blanket authorization. In an hour or two, that's just what you'll have.”

Niger dipped his oiled beard in assent. “Yes, sir,” he said. The animation, the sharpness of tone, was gone as he contemplated the situation. “Sir…” he went on diffidently. “I'll see to it that she's put in order to the extent possible. But she'll still be an over-age, under-maintained disaster waiting to happen. If she's really being fitted out for a long voyage … I don't envy the men aboard her.”

“Don't envy anybody, my friend,” said Aulus Perennius. He braced his left hand on the stern rail, then swung himself back to the platform with a clash and sparkling of boot studs and concrete. By the blazing Sun, he could still eat men half his age for breakfast, he thought in a surge of pride springing from the exertion. He grinned at the surprised tribune like a wolf confronting a lamb. “No,” he repeated, “don't envy anybody.”

*   *   *

The single, unsprung axle of the carriage found a harmonic with the courses of paving stones. The sympathetic vibration escalated what had been a burr into a series of hammering jolts. Perennius, at the reins, had been lost in thought before the jouncing lifted him back to present realities. He clucked to the pair of mules, urging them into the extra half-stride per second that broke the rhythm.

The agent looked over at his companion. Calvus had braced himself firmly with one hand on the seat and the other locked on the frame holding the carriage top. They had taken the vehicle from Rome to Ostia because Calvus had said he had never ridden a horse. Perennius had the feeling that the tall man had never ridden a carriage, either, now that he had watched him in one. Calvus seemed to have no subconscious awareness of where the next bump would come from and how he should shift to receive it. He was using his surprising strength to keep from being literally bounced out of the vehicle, but the battering that earned him must have been equivalent to all-in wrestling with a champion. Calvus never complained, though.