Birds of Prey (27 page)

“Are we going to take their ship?” the younger Illyrian asked with a nod at the pirate vessel.

Perennius had found a long spear for himself as well. He withdrew it with a crunch. “Might,” he said. “Sestius, do you know anything about sailing?”

The Cilician grunted. “A little,” he said. “Enough to know the few of us wouldn't even be able to slide this one off the beach.”

The agent glanced back at Calvus. The tall woman was wearing a tunic again. Perennius' own experience with the traveller's strength suggested that Sestius was probably wrong in detail. The basic opinion was valid, however. Main strength and awkwardness might get the ship launched, but it would not help them work it in a squall. “We can buy something to ride,” he said aloud. His eye brushed over the silver tray, the jeweled sword gripped by the Goth he had just finished. “Buy any kit we want, I suppose. The gods know, we aren't short of money right now.”

Perennius turned, eyeing the forested foothills of the Taurus Mountains. “For choice,” he went on, “we'd have the century of Marines we were supposed to. But we'll get by.” He slammed his spear into the chest of another moaning pirate and the ground beneath. “We'll get by.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

The gong cleft the pale air with a note as thin as a bird's cry.

“Say, what is that?” asked Sestius. He was leading while Gaius, the other healthy warrior among them, brought up the rear. The party was not straggling, however.

Perennius pointed full-armed past the centurion. A face of rock soft enough to have been weathered into a spindle overlooked the track by which the party proceeded. It was still about a quarter mile distant. The figure near the spire's tip was hidden against the pink-touched gray of its surface. Sunlight blinked rhythmically from the stick the figure swung against his gong.

Sestius paused. He switched the spear he carried to his left hand so that he could try the slip of his sword with his right.

“Watch that!” Perennius snapped. “Nothing hostile.” The agent began waving his own spear, butt-upward, toward the watchman. “If we act like we're a bunch of pirates, they'll turn us into fertilizer as soon as we're in bowshot. And I wouldn't blame them.”

A bell began to chime at a distance beyond the high cone of rock. The stick ceased to flash. A measurable moment later, the last gong-stroke rolled down to the agent and his party. “Well, we've been hoping to find a village, haven't we?” Gaius said aloud. The unusually high pitch of his voice showed that he too was aware that the first meeting was likely to be tense.

“It'll be all right,” Perennius said. He knew as he spoke that the words were as much sympathetic magic as a reasoned statement. “Let's get going.”

As the party walked on, it was noticeable that they all were trying to proceed quietly, even though they were already discovered. “We'll be all right,” Sabellia said aloud in unconscious echo of the agent. “Three armed men—four—” a nod toward Calvus who trudged fourth in the file—“they'll talk, not try fighting right away. And then they'll see we're peaceful.” She did not sound convinced either.

Beyond the rock spire, the twisting defile by which the party proceeded broadened into a valley. It was planted in wheat. The only interruptions in the smooth, green pattern were the ragged lambda shapes where the soil was too wet for the crop to have taken hold. The stems and leaves of the wheat beyond the gaps were a darker color than the sunbleached heads which alone were visible elsewhere. There were no evident fences or even corner stones.

The huts of the village huddled against the valley's further slope. There were thirty or so of them. It was hard to tell for sure, because the dwellings overhung one another as they climbed the hill. Most seemed to be small one- or two-room units. Since their backs were cut into the hill, it was impossible to be sure from the outside. There was no town wall. That was not surprising even in the present unsettled times. An enemy who bothered to attack from further up the hillside would be higher than the top of any practicable wall facing him.

What was surprising was the church.

“Thank God, we're among Christians,” Sabellia whispered.

That much was clear. The building itself was a spire shaped much like the natural outcropping which acted as a watchtower at the valley's head. At its peak, high enough at eighty feet to stand out against the sky, was a cross. The warning bell continued to ring from the small pergola by which the cross was supported. Beneath the belfry, the building stepped down to the ground in three levels of increasing diameter. The cylindrical walls were of native stone. The ashlars had been quarried recently enough to retain a pinkish yellow color which contrasted with the weathered gray of the slope beyond. The building had not been vaulted or even corbelled. Instead, the builders had used trusses and thatch for the three stepped roofs. That implied that each successive level of the spire was supported on vertical columns extending from the ground to the level's base. That was an incredibly awkward way to design a structure of the church's magnitude. It was also proof of the dedication of simple villagers who had executed so impressive a monument to their god without help from the outside.

At the moment, villagers were running toward the church from the common wheat field and from the garden plots terraced up the hillside. Black-faced sheep were blurs on the crest above, but the herdsmen must already have joined the general flow toward the tower.

The one exception was a man in a black robe which fluttered as he kicked his donkey toward the newcomers. As the villager approached, he tried to keep his left hand raised. The gold or gilded cross which he held wavered and jerked as the donkey beneath him trotted.

“A brave man,” Gaius commented as he watched the envoy. The courier glanced up at the outcrop from which they had been spotted initially. The rock was behind them now and he, like Perennius, was wondering if the lookout was still hidden in their rear.

“Three years ago, friends of mine were burned alive for refusing to sacrifice,” Sabellia said grimly. “Then the Lord chose to spare me for his future works, so I wasn't requested to sacrifice to idols when others were. Why do you think Christians would fear death by bandits when we go to our pyres singing hymns of praise?”

“At least they've got donkeys to sell,” remarked Sestius, possibly to put a cap on the present discussion. “I'll be damned glad to get off my own feet. Especially with the load of metal we're carrying—not that I'm complaining.”

“Yeah, well,” said the agent. “No reason for any of us to talk about what we picked up from the pirates. I don't doubt these folk are religious—” he nodded to the Gallic woman, keeping his face still and his eyes serious—“but there's no advantage to our putting temptation in their way. We'll offer them fair prices and as much more as it takes to get the animals … but we don't need to tell them just how much bullion we're hauling around.”

The agent was a little worried about Sabellia. Her faith had not been a secret before. Not from him, at least. He was used to the point of reflex to correlating data—expressions, gestures; the scraps of personal details that come out inevitably when a group of people live in each other's wallets for weeks at a time. If Perennius' mission had involved ferreting out Christians, he would … but the agent's mind shied away from that thought in which business conflicted with something more personal and less common to him. In any case, Perennius had little enough use for gods that he could not get concerned by the foibles of those people who felt differently. If Sabellia refused to sacrifice to the Emperor who served and represented the Empire—then Perennius also served and represented the Empire. The Gallic woman had saved his life, and that was already more of a benefit to the Emperor than a pinch of frankincense on a charcoal fire.

But they were all under stress, even the ice-calm Calvus. If being catapulted into a community of fellow-believers put Sabellia off on some unforeseeable religious tangent, it might cost the party her services. It might cost Perennius her presence … and Perennius looked away from her, toward the man on the donkey, to avoid the direction his thoughts were taking.

The rider reined up noisily, ten feet short of Perennius' party. The five of them had shifted instinctively into a ragged line abreast. All of them were looking determinedly non-violent. The agent had grounded his Gothic spear point-first in the soil. The shaft was taking much of his weight. His right thigh throbbed while he walked on it but when he stood still the feeling became agony if the limb had to support his body.

The man in the dark robe raised his cross. Most of his scalp had been shaven, though the hair surrounding the tonsure was black and bushy. “If you come in peace, travellers,” he said, “the blessings of the Annointed and of Dioscholias his servant be upon you.” Surprisingly, the man spoke in the local form of Syriac instead of the Greek Perennius had expected even this far back in the hills.

Stumblingly, the agent answered in the same Cilician dialect. “We are peaceful travellers, sir. Traders who expect to pay well for the food and beasts of burden we hope to buy from you.” Sestius
was
Cilician, and the Illyrian was fairly certain that Calvus could speak the language with the same facility that she had shown with every other tongue they had encountered. Perennius did not trust them to carry on the negotiations, however; and he had learned never to use an interpreter if there were any possibility of avoiding it. At best, an interpreter added a third personality to the discussion in hand.

The villager slid from his donkey and knelt. He folded both his hands in front of him over the stem of the crucifix and prayed. “Thanks be to Jesus the Anointed, font of all blessings, and to his servant Dioscholias who first brought his teachings to our valley.” The man stood again and said in a more businesslike tone, “Strangers, I am Father Ramphion, a disciple of the blessed Dioscholias, and his successor when he was translated to the throne of God. The Lord has blessed us by sending you into our midst. Come, join us in the love feast that is being prepared in your honor and in God's.” Ramphion gestured toward the huts.

“Father, we thank you,” the agent replied. “I am Aulus Perennius, and these are the companions of my journey.” He introduced the others, giving their real names—or in the case of Calvus, the false male name that was all Perennius knew her by. “We will be glad of your hospitality.” He smiled. “I had expected your fellows were engaged in another sort of preparations, after the warning gong.”

“Oh, here,” Father Ramphion said, offering Perennius the donkey's reins. “You're injured. You should not be walking.”

“Actually, I think it's better for the leg that I do use it,” the agent said. “But perhaps Sabellia…?”

The discussion degenerated at once into multiple refusals of the offer. The donkey, unconcerned, tugged from Ramphion's hand to the roadside to crop grass growing between the track and the wheat beyond. Abruptly, Sestius ended the nonsense by accepting the charity and mounting the beast. Perennius felt like an idiot for having wasted time and let matters get out of hand in such a ridiculous way. The agent never knew how to deal with generosity.

Perhaps he was fortunate that generosity was so rarely to be met with.

Father Ramphion had not forgotten the question Perennius had earlier implied, though. As the two men plodded after the mounted centurion, Ramphion said, “Of course, we're prepared to defend ourselves if needs be. To help God defend us, I should rather say.” He gestured toward the church. There were unglazed windows in the second and third levels of the stepped tower. The agent could now see that the only openings in the twenty-foot high base cylinder were the front door and a circuit of arrow slits at shoulder height in the stone wall. A proper military force with artillery and battering rams could take the structure without serious difficulty. A band of raiders like those the
Eagle
had fallen among would have turned away after an abortive assault or two against the stone. The church would preserve the villagers and such movable property as they could get inside it.

“But that has not occurred as yet, thank the Lord.” Ramphion continued. “All of those strangers who have come to the valley since Dioscholias brought God's teachings here have been like yourselves. Men of peace, wanderers … some poor souls displaced and brutalized by the scourges that wrack the sinful world beyond. May they all find peace in God.”

The valley itself certainly appeared to have found peace. Stacks of hay still remained from the previous year's harvest, though there must have been fresh pasturage for the village's flocks for over a month now. The common sheepfold was extensive; a gray, freestone structure adjacent to the human habitations. Smoke drifted above the valley wall, but Perennius could not pinpoint its source against the blur of rock and dull green vegetation. The valley was the sort of place that Sestius had described as being his dream and prayer of finding in his native province.

With that thought in mind, Perennius asked the villager. “Ah, are you all Christians here? That is—the church looks as if it would have been an enormous task, even with everyone in the village concentrating on it.”

Father Ramphion nodded. He appeared to be older than the agent had at first believed him to be; perhaps even in his mid-forties. His limbs were strong and his fringe of hair had a youthful luster. “Not quite all of us, no,” he said. “There are two brothers in the village, Azon and Erzites, who follow the appalling idolatry of their father. The rest of us, yes, we are followers of the Anointed.”

Ramphion raised his eyes toward the spire of the church. What must be most of the populace of the village was lining up in front of the structure, men to the right of the doorway and women to the left. “It was a marvelous work, barely completed when Dioscholias was translated to heaven five years ago. Only the Saved had a hand in the building, of course. Azon and Erzites are victims of a particularly foul error. They claim to be Christians also, but they worship the Anointed in the form of the Serpent of Eden.”