Birds of Prey (36 page)

Perennius turned. Calvus would not meet his eyes. He touched her cheek and guided her face around until she was looking at him. “They're all dead,” the agent said. “Every one of them. Now, do you want to tell the boy why you passed yourself off for a man, or shall I?”

The face that Perennius could not have forced to turn now softened into a smile. “You tell him, Aulus,” the woman said, “if you can.”

“Blazes, what do you think I spend most of my life doing?” the agent grumbled. “Chopping weeds?” He patted his protégé lightly on the knee to return the discussion to him. “Look, Gaius,” the agent said, “how many six foot four bald women have you met in embassies to the Emperor?”

“Well, he could have worn a wig,” the courier mumbled through his wine. He was startled enough to have continued to use a masculine pronoun.

“Fine, how many six foot four women whose wigs slip in a breeze or a scuffle—have you forgotten what we went through
before
we met the Goths? Blazes, friend—” Perennius had to catch himself every time so as not to address Gaius as “boy”—“who takes a woman seriously? Oh, I know—Odenath's tough, but his wife Zenobia could eat him for breakfast. And sure, there's been some at Rome, too. But not openly, not at Rome. Queens are for wogs, and lady ambassadors would be an insult, however—” he looked at Calvus—“persuasive she might be. There are limits.” Perennius' voice lost its light tone as he repeated, “There are limits.” In the agent's mind, Germans knelt and laughed and grunted. “But those things can be worked out too,” he concluded.

With a barking laugh and a return to banter as he looked at Calvus, Perennius added, “Damned if I yet know how you managed it, though. Manage it.”

“I was raised to have control of my muscles—and bodily functions,” the tall woman said. The agent was beginning to understand that “raised” was a euphemism for “bred” when the woman applied it to herself. “And as you know, I can be persuasive. There are many things for sailors to look at at night beside details of who's squatting at the rail.” Calvus laughed. It was the first time Perennius had heard her do so. She twitched her outer tunic. “Full garments help too, of course.”

There was again a bustle at the trap door. This time Cleiton himself climbed through ahead of Sestius. Sabellia followed the two men. Her red hair was beginning to curl into ringlets as it grew out.

“Quintus has told me where you were planning to go,” the innkeeper said, gesturing as soon as he no longer needed his arms to haul him onto the roof. “This is impossible now. Besides, Typhon's Cavern has a bad reputation at the best of times. I'm not superstitious, but…”

The centurion broke in on the sentence whose thought, at least, had been completed. “Cleiton says the story is that there's a dragon in the area around the gorge, now. Some people are saying it's Typhon himself, released from Hell.”

The agent grimaced. Sestius had been told to get information, and the soldier could not help the sort of nonsense he was told. Perennius thought he had heard an undercurrent of belief in the myth Sestius was retailing, however. That sort of crap, like tales of hostile armies a million men strong, buried reality and made a hard job harder.

Cleiton saw and understood the agent's expression. The innkeeper straightened. His voice regained for him whatever dignity he might have lost through the gravy stains on his tunic and his wispy beard. “These are not stories, honored guest,” Cleiton said stiffly. “Kamilides, the son of Sossias, sister of my wife's uncle, manages a villa on the edge of the gorge, Typhon's Cavern. Something began raiding their flocks over a month ago. Kamilides organized a hunt with dogs and nets, thinking a lion must have crossed the mountains. What they found was a dragon as big as—”

The innkeeper paused. The best recommendation for his truthfulness was the fact that he rejected as preposterous the simile he had probably heard from his informant. Instead Cleiton went on, “Very big, hugely big. It was a dragon with legs, and when it chased them it ran faster than the horses of those who were mounted. Three of the men were killed. The rest were saved only because they scattered in all directions and the beast could follow only a few. They left the villa just as it was. Kamilides says if the owner wants his sheep, he can come up from Antioch and look for them himself. The monster is worse than the Persians, because everybody at least knew there
were
Persians.”

Perennius stood up so that he could bow. “Gracious host,” he said, “I apologize for my discourtesy.”

Not that the fact Cleiton believed the story made it more likely to be true. Still, the agent had once seen a crocodile arise from its mudbank and chase the horsemen who were trying to collect it with lassoes for the arena. Mud had slopped house-high, and it was only the horsemen's initial lead that saved them from the reptile's brief rush. Perhaps, perhaps … and there was that thing in the sea before.

But there was no choice. They were going to Typhon's Cavern, myth and the Guardians be damned.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The sun was not directly as grim a punishment as was the dust which rose from the road's seared surface. Perennius swirled the mouthful of water repeatedly before spitting it out. The dark stain on the road dried even as he watched.

“I don't know anything about Typhon,” Calvus said. Her outstretched legs were long enough that her toes were lighted by the sun over the wall against which the party sat. Her feet were slim. The big toes seemed abnormally pronounced by comparison with the other toes. “Tell me about him.”

One result of the dragon scare was that Perennius had not been able to hire drivers to take charge of the baggage animals. Sabellia was an effective drover. The rest of them had proven they were not, at considerable cost in temper and bruises. You cannot expect to hit a donkey with your hand and hurt the beast nearly as much as the blow will hurt you. “Blazes, what would I know?” Perennius said. “
I
haven't had the advantages of a rhetorical education.”

“Well,
I
didn't ask you for it, did I?” said Gaius in a hurt voice. He sprawled against the wall to the other side of the older Illyrian. Gaius leaned forward from the wall so that he could look directly at Calvus. “Typhon,” he continued in the declamatory sing-song that was indeed the mark of the education Perennius had procured for him, “was the son of Tartaros and Gaia, Hell and Earth. Typhon is the Hundred-Headed Serpent, the Hundred-Voiced, who strove against the gods. He was cast down from the very threshold of Olympus by the thunderbolt of Zeus—or, as others have it, by the blazing arrows of the unconquered Sun in his guise as Apollo by which the Greeks know him.”

Only Perennius' exhaustion had spoken in his gibe about rhetorical educations, but that was not an excuse he would have accepted from anybody else. The advantages Perennius had had as a boy were intelligence and the willingness to be as ruthless as a task required. The agent saw very quickly that flowery prose and the ability to argue points of grammar by citing minor poets dead a thousand years were the only routes to preferment in the civil service.

They were routes open to the talented poor as well as to the rich, since the Empire itself and many individual communities provided schooling by accomplished rhetoricians. Perennius could have fought his way alone to a position as a high-placed jurist, the way the poet Lucian had. Or he might have accepted the private tutoring that Navigatus had offered to pay for early in their association. Perennius had been handicapped; but the Goth, Theudas, had started as the agent's apparent superior also.

The system of choosing administrators for the Empire was fair enough, to the extent that anything in life is fair. Perennius refused to become involved with it simply because he saw the process as the greatest and most ineluctable threat which the Empire faced.

There had been threats to the borders ever since Rome was a hilltop settlement of bandits. The Germans, the Moors, the glittering host of the Persians … all could be turned back or slaughtered by the Imperial forces—if the latter were intelligently marshalled, competently led, and supplied in accordance with their needs and the Empire's abilities. Venal officials were a problem as old as government. The damage they did was inevitable; and, like that of caterpillars in a fruit tree, was supportable under all but the most extreme situations.

What was far more dangerous than graft was the increasing number of administrative documents which were unintelligible even to the men who drafted them. Archaic words; neologisms; technical terms borrowed for effect from other disciplines and then misused in a number of different fashions—all of these horrors were becoming staples of the tax laws and the criminal code, of reports on barley production and the extent of flood-damage on the Pyramos. Civil servants were affecting Tacitean variation without the brevity Tacitus had prized equally; fullness beyond that of Cicero without Cicero's precision.

And not a damned one of them could add his own household accounts, much less figure the income of a province. Slaves did both, and both badly.

But Perennius' mind that saw the Empire talking itself in declining circles toward destruction was by that the more fiercely determined that Gaius would succeed. The darker the shadows over the general future, the greater Perennius' need to emphasize his closest approximation to personal continuance. Thus the tutors he had not suggested but rather forced on his protégé. Even now, listening to a series of glosses on Homer and Hesiod which were as impressive as they were pointless, the agent could not wish that Gaius had been apprenticed to a mule driver.

The younger Illyrian paused. Sestius, in the shade further along the wall, said, “Around here, we always said Typhon came out of the earth in Cilicia.” When Calvus turned, the centurion made a languid east-west gesture. “All along the Taurus here, there's straight-walled valleys, hundreds of feet deep … and sometimes a mile across.”

The tall woman nodded in understanding. “Sinkholes,” she said. “Your rocks are limestone. When the water eats them away under the surface, there's enough volcanic activity to collapse the shell covering the holes.”

Sestius shrugged. Beside him, Sabellia appeared to be more interested in the sounds their hobbled donkeys made foraging on the other side of the wall. All members of the party were too tired to act animated. “Whatever,” the centurion said. “Anyway, some of the gorges have caves at one end. The one that's called Typhon's Cavern, the one you need to go to—” Sestius had not been told the full purpose of their mission, but he had seen the tentacled thing from the balcony and must have had suspicions—“is … well, nobody knows how far that cave goes. There's a path into the gorge along one of the walls. I mean, the place is big, there's trees and sometimes they pasture sheep down in it. And you can get into the cave itself easy, it's got a mouth like a funnel and it just keeps going down, getting a little tighter and a little slicker each step of the way.”

The Cilician paused and shrugged again. “Some people think it leads all the way to Hell, sure. There's a chapel built at the throat of it, of stone and real old. And I suppose some people even believe that Typhon crawled up out of the cave. But though the place has never had a good reputation, this latest stuff about a dragon is new. And it isn't a myth.”

“Your Guardians?” Perennius asked with his eyes closed against the shimmering road.

“I doubt it,” Calvus replied. Her voice drifted out of the tawny blur. “More likely it's another result of my arrival. We hadn't any experience with the process before my sibs and I were sent here. The side effects of the process—” the catch in the tall woman's voice might have resulted from nothing more than a dry throat—“were not things that had been foreseen. At least, not things that we were warned to expect.”

“Would you have come anyway?” the agent asked the world beyond his eyelids.

“Yes.” The word seemed too flat to convey a loss of siblings which was more traumatic than a multiple amputation. “But I'm not sure they knew that we would come. I'm not sure the technicians realized how well they had raised us.”

“Well, if we've got dragons as well as Guardians to deal with,” Perennius said, “we'll deal with them. At least the bastards don't seem to be able to track you down while we're moving.”

The appearance of another variable did not distress the agent. Rather the contrary, and Perennius knew himself well enough to guess why. The agent was practical and experienced enough to make all the preparations possible under the circumstances. He could never be comfortable risking failure because of his own laziness. That would have been as unthinkable as refusing to take a useful action because it might involve his own injury or death.

But when it was impossible to plan, when Aulus Perennius had to react to what the moment brought … when success or failure balanced on his wits and a sword's edge—that was when life became worthwhile for its own sake. If the mission were entering the mists of chance more deeply as they approached their goal, then so be it. They would deal with what came.
He
would deal with what came.

“Time we got moving again,” the agent said aloud. “According to the itinerary, there's an inn some five miles farther on.”

“It may be abandoned,” the centurion suggested. “Cleiton said there isn't any traffic past the gorge any more.”

“There'll be somebody there to serve us,” Perennius said unconcernedly, “or we'll make do with what they left behind.” The agent began to stand. He used his hands in the chinks of the wall behind him to support his weight until he was willing to ease it back onto his legs. The spear wound was warm to the touch, but it seemed to have caused less swelling than even a bruise usually would. Again he wondered whether Calvus could influence muscles as well as minds.