Birds of Prey (5 page)

The pettiness, the dishonesty ineradicable in a system built on secrecy, the filth he must know about the Empire which it was his life to protect … all of those factors had put the Illyrian on the edge of eruption. The eight following years in the field were at least seven more than he could have survived in a Headquarters billet. By now, however, Perennius had come to the gloomy conclusion that nothing would save him from himself much longer.

There was a guard at the window on the peristyle court. He was there to make sure that no one slipped in that way in a desperate attempt to get the Director's approval of a plan or document. Perennius nodded to the soldier. The man laid a brawny arm across the opening as the agent stepped toward it. “Keep clear, buddy,” the guard snapped. “Go see them if you need to get in.” He nodded toward the ushers in the passage. They were already hedged about by men who felt they had to talk to Navigatus.

“Calm down,” Perennius said. He felt unusually calm himself, now that he had taken care of his business with Zopyrion. It was a state almost like that following orgasm, the relaxation which follows the draining of all the self's resources into a single triumphant moment. It took the edge off the sword of his temper, though the iron baton which remained could be nasty enough in all truth. Perennius reached out to the stone frame, holding his orders closed in his hand.

Navigatus reclined on the other side of the drawing room. He faced three-quarters away from the agent. Unexpectedly, one of the other heads within was turned toward Perennius rather than toward the Director. The man staring at the agent was six feet four inches tall, but much thinner-framed than the norm of protein-fed barbarians of that height. He was starkly bald with only a hint of eyebrows like those which regrow after facial burns. The eye contact surprised Perennius. Its intensity shocked him, stiffening the agent with a gasp which convinced the guard to get involved again.

“
Hey
there,” the soldier said. He set his left palm at the lower end of the agent's breastbone. “Get the hell
back,
I—”

Perennius gripped the other's wrist with his own left hand and squeezed. There was no emotion in his response. That part of the agent's body was working on instinct. His right hand slapped the wooden tablet three times against the sill. The sharp rattle of sound cut through the buzz of concurrent conversations. It drew all eyes toward Perennius, as it had been intended to do. That was no longer an intellectual act either. The agent's conscious mind was focused on the bald, spare man who looked at him and looked away, just as Navigatus shouted, “Aulus! By Pollux, everybody make way for my friend here!” The Director rose to his feet with a touch of awkwardness because in reclining he had slowed the circulation to his left leg.

Perennius laughed. “Say, I'll come through the window,” he called, “if it won't earn me a foot of steel up the ass.” He released the guard, looking at the man with interest for the first time. Perennius' grip on the soldier's wrist had paralyzed the man as small bones, already in contact, had grated closer. “Christ the
Savior,
you bastard!” the soldier hissed as he massaged the injured limb with his good hand. Perennius had been distracted or he would not have squeezed so hard. Still, no permanent harm done, the agent thought as he swung himself over the waist-high sill to meet his superior.

The two men clasped and kissed, to the amazement of most of the others in the room. Navigatus was not, all things considered, a particularly arrogant man, but he had a strong sense of formality. He wore his toga on all public occasions. His subordinates and those outsiders seeking audiences with him had learned early that if they wished to be recognized, they too had best don the uncomfortable woolen garment. Even then the Director tended to keep his distance; though so far as Perennius knew, Marcus had never gotten to the point of greeting everyone through his usher as if direct verbal contact would somehow soil him. Seeing Navigatus embracing the agent and his travel stains was more of a surprise than word of another attempted coup would have been.

Much more of a surprise than that.

Navigatus continued to hold the agent by one hand as he turned to his head usher. “Delius,” he said, “clear this—no, Aulus and I will go out in the garden, that's what we'll do. Close that—” he pointed at the window opening into the garden—“and see that we're not disturbed.”

“Just
one
moment, your Respectability,” begged an intense young man with the broad stripe of Senate membership along the hem of his tunic. The Senate itself was a debating club rather than the governing council of the Empire, but those who debated there tended to be rich and powerful men in their own right. The young Senator reached out with a scrolled petition in his right hand, while his left hand tried to clutch at the Director's sleeve.

The usher thrust out his ivory baton. The broad stripe saved the man who wore it from rapped knuckles, but it did not bring him any nearer to the response he sought. “Later, Felix, later,” Navigatus grumbled over his shoulder. “My goodness, Aulus, you're looking so fit that it makes a used-up old man like me jealous. And how's that boy of yours, Docleus? Pleased with his appointment, I trust? You know, we sent him to bring you the recall orders because we weren't sure you'd accept them from anybody else.”

Perennius looked sharply at his superior. The guards in the passage were pushing the civilians among them back into the peristyle court. Navigatus had a bland expression as he stepped out of the drawing room and led the agent away from the confusion. “Gaius is well, thank you,” Perennius said cautiously. “He does indeed appreciate the favor you've shown him; and of course, I appreciate it as well. His father was a friend of mine until I enlisted. When he drowned, I sort of—tried to look after the boy, you know.”

“Of course I know,” agreed Navigatus as he stepped out into the sunbright garden. “No children of your own—just like me. Though of course
I
married, at least. Would you like some wine, Aulus? I'll admit we didn't expect you for another several days at best.”

Perennius ran an index finger down the side of a young fig tree. The bark was as gray and dry as the skin of the lizard that scuttled around the trunk to where it could no longer see him. “Why did you recall me, Marcus?” the agent asked softly. “I was perfectly placed,
perfectly.
” He looked up at the older man. “Marcus, I was helping
plan
the attack. Personal representative of the Emperor Postumus of Gaul—oh, they were very pleased, they'd been planning an embassage themselves but it had been let slip in the press of other business.”

The Director sighed as he bent over a bed of russet gladiolas. “It's come to that, then?” he said. He clipped a stalk beneath its spray of blooms, parting the pithy stem with his long thumbnail. “The Autarch of Palmyra is disloyal to the Emperor after all?” He lifted the regal blooms to his nose and sniffed.

“Marcus,” Perennius pleaded, “Odenath was never loyal. He's a jumped-up princeling who fought the Persians because they wouldn't accept his surrender. He won because he knew his deserts and because he's a sharp bastard, a really sharp one, I give him that. But he didn't save the Empire; he saved his
ass
 … and now he figures that fits him to rule the whole business in place of his Majesty, the Emperor.”

“Well, we can use him, I'm sure,” said Navigatus. “Such lovely flowers as these, you'd expect them to have a marvelous odor also.” He laid the spray against the hem of his toga. The russet blossoms were almost identical to the pair of narrow stripes that marked the Director as a Knight. “But instead there's nothing, only the color.”

“Damn it, Marcus!” the agent cried. He slammed the heel of his hand against the fig. The lizard catapulted through the air, twisting madly until it hit the ground and scurried off. “Can we use Postumus too? Is it to the Empire's benefit that Gaul, Britain, Spain all claim they're independent now? Can we make clever policy out of the fact that every field commander with a thousand men thinks he ought to be on the throne instead of Gallienus?”

A large carpenter bee with a black abdomen lighted on the gladiola spray in Navigatus' hand. The Director's attention appeared to be concentrated on the bee as he said, “Aulus, we can't worry about every little thing that goes wrong. We have to carry out our assigned duties as best we can, and we have to trust that other people do the same.” He sighed again. “Now if all my personnel were like you … are you sure I can't convince you to join me here in Rome? There's so many things…”

“We're not talking about little things, Marcus,” the agent said with dispassionate certainty. “We're talking about Franks raiding from the Rhine to the Pillars of Hercules, while Goths and Herulians spill through the Bosphorus into the Aegean.”

“Well, I know that, of course, but—”

“Do you know that we were damned near caught by those German pirates when we sailed from Sidon? That they were
this
close—” Perennius snapped his fingers—“before a little storm blew up and separated us?”

“I've said how much I appreciated your haste in returning, haven't I?” the Director said. The spray in his hands was trembling so much that the bee retreated from its flower cup and hung an inch or two away in the air, buzzing querulously.

“Marcus,
sir,
” the agent went on, “everywhere I go, I see the big landowners shutting off their estates. They grow for themselves, they manufacture whatever they need in house, they've got their own armies … and the good
gods
help the tax gatherer who dares to set a foot on their lands.”

“Aulus, there are agents assigned to that duty—” the Director began.

“Then they're doing a piss-poor job!” his subordinate shouted. “
Piss
poor. And the coinage!” Perennius reached into his purse. “Have you tried to get someone to take a recent denarius, Marcus? Without feeding it to him at the point of your sword, I mean?” He found the coin he wanted, a freshly-minted piece with the bearded visage of Gallienus on the obverse. The stocky agent strode to the fountain in the center of the garden. A marble boy held a marble goose on his shoulder. Water spurted from the beak of the goose and the penis of the boy. Gesturing with the coin like a conjuror introducing a sleight, Perennius then rang it leadenly on the stone curb.

“No difference but shape between this and a sling bullet,” he asserted with bitter accuracy. “Even the goddam
wash
on it—” his thumb kneaded the shiny surface—“is tin, not silver.”

Navigatus said nothing. Perennius took a deep breath. In a voice much quieter than that of his last diatribe, and without meeting the Director's eyes, he said, “Marcus, you say ‘trust other people to do their duty.' Nobody does their duty but you and me, and the Emperor. And when I see this—” he spun the coin expertly off his thumb. It made a glittering arc over his head, then splashed down in the fountain where the two jets merged—“I swear if I don't think I'm giving his Majesty too much credit.”

“You don't want to say that,” Navigatus murmured, correct in a number of ways. The bee had left him, but the spray of blossoms was still again in his hand. “You know, Aulus,” he said to the flower, “I've never meant to be other than a friend to you—”

The agent paced quickly to the older man's side. “I know that, Marcus,” he said. “I didn't mean—”

“—but I sometimes regret what I've done,” the Director continued, quelling the interruption by raising his eyes. “If I hadn't—pushed you, you might be much happier now, one of Postumus' battalion commanders and married to that little girl of yours.”

“Nobody makes another person into something he wasn't before,” said the younger man quietly.

“I often tell myself that, my friend,” said Navigatus. He let the gladiolas fall and took Perennius by the hand again.

The agent stared at something far distant from the clasped hands on which his eyes were focused. “Besides,” he said, “Julia ended it herself. Her—emotional state was causing conflict with her duties as a priestess.” As old as the phrase was in his memory, it still had edges that could tear. “That's why I accepted the transfer to Numidia with you, Marcus. Not because of the promotion.” He smiled at their linked hands.

“Ah,” said Navigatus. “I, ah.… Well, of course, there's still the matter that forced me to recall you from Palmyra, isn't there?”

“Indeed there is,” agreed the agent as he led the other man to one of the stone benches against the back wall of the garden. “When all else fails, there's always duty.”

“You see,” said Navigatus as he fished a slim scroll from the wallet beneath his toga, “he came with this, which isn't something that I see every day. Even here.” He slipped off the vellum cover and handed the document to Perennius.

The agent read the brief Latin inscription carefully. “Can't say it's not to the point,” he remarked as he rolled the document again. It had read, “The Emperor Caesar Publius Licinius Gallienus Pius Augustus to Marcus Navigatus. The bearer of this rescript, Lucius Cloelius Calvus, is to be afforded the full support of your Bureau. All his requests are to be executed as if from my lips. When it is necessary to accomplish the tasks thus imposed, you may apply for assistance from my Director of Administration, Aurelius Quirinius.”

The damned thing was in vermilion ink, Perennius noted, and it didn't look to be in the handwriting of a professional scribe either. Blazes! “All right,” he said as he handed back the imperial rescript, “what
does
he request?”

“You, Aulus,” said the Director, meeting Perennius' gaze steadily. “He wants you.”