Birds of Prey (13 page)

“Sestius,” the agent said, “you acted like a fool, and it could have gotten you killed.” The agent's tone was flat, his words neutral enough to leave doubt whether the implied slayer was an enemy or Perennius himself in an access of rage. Perennius' hand was on the courier's arm, as if the older man were drawing some support from the contact.

“Yes, sir,” the centurion said. His eyes stared across at the shore. He had sense enough not to add anything to the minimum required. Sestius had seen men like the agent before, and it was only need that had put him in the Illyrian's path.

“You told me what you planned to do after the operation,” Perennius continued in the same flat voice, “and that was all right; I could plan for it. But I can't plan for what I don't know, can I, soldier?”

“No sir.” Sestius' cheek was red and swelling with the print of the agent's fingers. Sabellia glanced at her companion and sucked in her breath. The slap had been lost to her in the wave of her own confusion.

“And would you like to guess how I feel about people who think they've fooled me, soldier?” the agent went on. His fingers tensed, only momentarily but hard enough that Gaius winced.

“Sir,” said Sestius to the air, “I didn't think we'd fool you, but I was desperate. Having Bella with me was the only way I was willing to, to settle. I'm sorry.”

Perennius looked at the woman. She was younger by a decade than Sestius, but that was normal for a soldier with some rank on him. She edged closer to her man. The agent remembered another Gallic girl who had not been willing—or able, but it was all the same to love's victim—to stand by a soldier. “All right, Quintus,” Perennius said softly, “she can stay until I hear some reason why she shouldn't. But don't ever try to play me for a fool again.”

He turned abruptly. “I'll show you our cabin,” he threw over his shoulder. “You can get your gear stowed properly.”

Calvus was with him, a half step toward the stern before even Gaius realized what was happening. To the tall man, Perennius muttered, “Thanks. I was so mad about what the fool had done that I forgot it wasn't a
thing
he'd tried to smuggle aboard, it was a person. Spunky bitch.”

They were striding between the ventilator grating and the starboard edge of the deck. Though the span of deck was as wide as any sidewalk in Rome, Calvus stumbled badly enough to make the agent nervous. Perennius crossed behind the taller man to walk outboard of him, just in case. The coxswain had shifted stroke to the lower bank of oars, endeavoring to exercise the raw company by thirds before trusting them to keep time in synchrony. The principle was all well enough, but it did not wholly prevent clattering and lurches of the hull as rowers caught crabs. “You noticed immediately that the companion was female,” Calvus remarked. His hand brushed the agent's shoulder to save his balance. Gaius was directly behind them, with the couple a pace further back. Though it did not appear to matter, the traveller spoke no louder than Perennius alone could hear.

The agent shrugged. “Sestius was hiding something,” he said. “Something he didn't want noticed. I thought he'd brought his chicken aboard. Then I saw her move, the way her throat looked—and knowing there was
something
going to be wrong with her … Well, it wasn't chicken, it was coney.” He looked sharply at Calvus. “You knew before I did, didn't you?”

The tall man nodded. “I didn't realize it would matter to you. It can be difficult to know what information you want—or when I ought to give it to you.”

The liburnian was anything but luxurious. Still, the five passengers had as much privacy as one of the pair of stern cabins could give their number. Perennius opened the hatch and pegged it back to the bulkhead. Amidships, a party of sailors was preparing to hoist the mainsail under directions shouted from the poop. “She earned a berth when she pulled the knife on me,” the agent said quietly. Louder and with a gesture toward the diffident centurion, he called, “Stow your duffle, but remember this is all the shelter we'll have if the weather turns sour, Quintus.”

Sestius stepped into the cabin between Calvus and the agent. He swung his stuffed field pack off his shoulder to clear the low lintel. Sabellia followed him with a burden scarcely smaller. Her eyes watched Perennius with wary acceptance.

“But I really don't like to be played for a fool,” the agent repeated to the figure across the hatch from him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Dolphins ahead!” cried the lookout at the masthead, but Perennius in the prow could see that the monster approaching them was no line of dolphins. Presumably the sailor from his better vantage knew that too and had spoken in the same hopeful euphemism that caused the Furies to be referred to as the ‘Kindly-minded Ones.' The friendly, man-aiding dolphins were traditionally bearers of good luck, while the creature now rippling toward the
Eagle
looked to be none of those things.

Gaius and Sestius were aft, giving the Marines their third day of weapons drill. When they broke up for individual fencing practice, the agent would join them. At the moment it was as least as important to teach the contingent the meaning of basic commands in Latin. The
Eagle
was west of Corcyra, the landfall intended for that evening. The liburnian was proceeding with a fair wind and a slow stroke—practice for the rowers, while the Marines drilled above them.

Sabellia, at the agent's left in the bow, squinted and said, “
That's
what a dolphin looks like?”

“No,” said Calvus, “not a dolphin. Not anything at all that should be on Earth at this time.”

“Blazes, that's the truth!” Perennius said. He glanced around quickly to see what weapons there were that might be more useful than his sword.

The creature's head was broader than a horse's and was more than twice as long. Because the thing was approaching and Perennius was low enough that spray wetted him even in a calm sea, the agent could not be sure of the beast's length. It appeared to be an appreciable fraction of the ship's own hundred-plus feet. The yellow teeth in its jaws were large enough to be seen clearly as the distance closed. Porpoises undulate vertically. The mottled fin along this creature's spine did rise and fall, but the body itself rippled sideways in a multiple sculling motion. It looked like nothing Perennius had ever seen in his life, and it looked as dangerous as the agent himself was.

“Stand to!” Perennius roared in a barrack's-square voice which even the open horizon did not wholly swallow.

It was incredible that this ragged-toothed monster could have thrashed within a ship's length of them and attract so little attention. The lookout was paralyzed at his post now that proximity gave the absolute lie to his optimism. The deck crew had its tasks or its leisure, neither category worth interruption for a pod of dolphins. Sabellia was willing enough to act in a crisis, but the sea and its creatures were all so new to her that she did not even realize there
was
a crisis at the moment.

As for Calvus, Calvus was—as always—calmly interested. While Perennius shouted and ran for one of the boat-pikes racked against the mast, the tall man watched the dark, serpentine creature until it sounded and disappeared beneath the liburnian's keel.

The Marines had exploded out of formation at Perennius' cry. They gripped their spears for use as they stumbled forward to join the agent. The crew, seamen and officers alike, jumped up alertly as well. Like the Marines—and Perennius himself—they were looking toward the bow. The waves continued to foam around the stem and the barely-submerged stump of the ram. The sea held no tracks, and there was no sign of the creature remaining.

“It won't be back, I think,” Calvus said before Perennius could ask his question or the mob of men on deck could ask theirs of him. “Calm them. It won't do any good to have them wondering.”

“Easy for
you
to say,” Perennius snarled. He knew full well that anything he could say to calm the men around him would make him look a fool. Well, any attempt to convince them that he had really seen a monster with daggers for teeth would have the same effect—if he were lucky. If his luck was out, he'd have a mutiny no threats could quell.

“I guess it was a log,” the agent said aloud, giving the onlookers a weak smile. Sestius had stepped quickly to Sabellia's side. She took his arm. The woman walked the ship with a hand on her knife, but she was never far from the centurion or Perennius either. Any dangers the agent posed went beyond a bout of unwanted slap and tickle. “Or maybe it was—” Perennius wet his lips—“some dolphins, yes.” He glanced up at the lookout involuntarily. The sailor stared back at him in frozen agreement.

By the unconquered Sun, thought the agent, maybe it
was
all a dream, a mirage. They were alone on the sea with no more than the waves and a single high-flying seabird as company.

“All right, fall in again,” Gaius ordered harshly. He liked the authority he got from drilling the Marines; but after he spoke, he looked back carefully to Perennius. As the sailors returned to their own duties, one of the mates said, “His Highness is seeing mermaids. Maybe one of you lads ought to offer to haul his ashes for him before he hurts himself on a knothole.” There was general laughter.

Perennius appeared not to be listening. He walked back to the bow. The fourteen-foot long pike was still in his right hand. He carried it just ahead of the balance so that its butt brushed the deck and its point winked in the air ahead of him at the height of a man's throat. The only sign the agent made to show he was not simply bemused at making a foolish mistake was his peremptory gesture to Calvus to join him by the bowsprit. It was unnecessary. The tall man had already turned in unison with the agent. Sabellia followed also, unasked but expected as Sestius went back to his training duties.

“Now, what in
blazes
was that?” the agent asked. His voice held the fury of Father Sun, reswallowing the life that was his creation in tendrils of inexorable flame. “And don't give me any crap about dolphins!” Even to himself, Perennius would not admit how fearful he was that what he had “seen” was only a construct of his diseased mind.

“It was less like a dolphin than you are,” said the traveller calmly, always calmly. “It appears to have been a—” he looked at the agent, his lips pursing around the choice of a word—“marine reptile, a tylosaurus. It eats fish, though it would probably make short enough work of a man in the water. The ship itself is far too large to be potential prey, so I was not concerned.”

The fact of identification has its own power over the thing identified. Perennius looked from Calvus to the pike in his hand. “Oh,” he said in chagrin, conscious of the woman's eyes as well. He
had
made a fool of himself in his panic. “I hadn't seen one before.”

“No, you certainly hadn't,” the traveller agreed. “The last of them disappeared from Earth sixty-five million years ago. I don't think it will be able to stay alive very long in this age. The seas must be far too salty, so that it will dehydrate and die.”

In a society that valued rhetoric over communication, mathematics were a slave's work—or a spy's. Numbers—of men, of wealth, of distances—were a part of Perennius' job, so he had learned to use them as effectively as he did the lies and weapons which he also needed. But even in a day when inflation was rampant and the word for a small coin had originally meant ‘a bag of money,' the figure Calvus had thrown out gave the agent pause. While Perennius struggled with the concept, the Gallic woman sidestepped the figures and went to the heart of the problem. “You say they're all dead,” she said in her own smooth dialect of Latin, “and you say we just saw one. Where did it come from?”

The traveller was looking astern, toward the empty waves past the rope-brailed canvas of the mainsail. Perhaps he was looking much farther away than that. “Either there is something completely separate working,” he said “or that was a side-effect of the way I came here. I can't be sure. I was raised to know and to find—certain things. And to act in certain ways. This isn't something that I would need to understand, perhaps … but I rather think it was not expected.”

The tall man shrugged. He looked at Sabellia, at the agent, with his stark black eyes again. “This was not tested, you see. It was not in question that the technique would work, but the ramifications could be as various as the universe itself. That's why they sent all six of us together … and I am here.”

“Calvus, I don't understand,” Perennius said. He watched his hands squeeze pointlessly against the weathered gray surface of the pike staff. “But if you say that it's all right, I'll accept that.”

“Aulus Perennius, I don't know whether or not it is all right,” the tall man said. “We didn't have time to test the procedure that sent us here.” The smooth-skinned, angular face formed itself—relaxed would have been the wrong word—into a smile. “We did not have time,” Calvus repeated wonderingly. “Yes, I've made a joke. I wonder how my siblings would react to me now?” He smiled again, but less broadly. “Contact with you has changed me more than could have been expected before we were sent off.”

Sabellia began to laugh. Perennius looked at the woman. “You too?” he said sourly.

Sabellia's hair was beginning to bleach to red-blond after days of sea-reflected sunlight. “It's the idea of anyone getting a sense of humor by associating with you, Lord Perennius,” she said. Her giggle made the sarcasm of “Lord” less cutting, though abundantly clear.

“That wasn't quite what I meant,” said Calvus. He looked from one of his companions to the other.

But as the agent strode toward the mast to rack the pike again, he too began to laugh.